FreeBSD and DELL Perc H200

[Holger Kipp]

On 20. April 2011, 22:56 Simon L. B. Nielsen [simon at nitro.dk] wrote

> On 19 Apr 2011, at 22:16, Holger Kipp wrote:
>
>> I have to install two production servers from Dell that come with a Perc H 200 controller.
>> Disks are not recognized with 8.2-RELEASE :-(
>
> AFAIK Perc H 200 should be supported by mps(4) which wasn't merged to stable/8 until after 8.2.

Yep, I noted that :-( Also that mps is currently only supporting JBODs.

> > Any ideas? If this works with 8-stable, where can I download an ISO Image?
> Unfortunately the latest official snapshots were before the driver was merged.
> You could try first just to boot on the curent / FreeBSD 9 snapshots and see
> if it sees your disks at all.
> You can get the snapshot from ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/201102/ .

201102 snapshot is for ia64 and ppc only :-| (and only 9.0-CURRENT)
201101 9.0 snapshots are for amd64, i386 (and 8.2 is only PRERELEASE)

I have used the 9.0-CURRENT-201101 now which at least sees the disks as JBOD
(Raid 1 drive is not recognized). I have now installed a zfs-only system according to
the excellent documentation found here:
https://www.dan.me.uk/blog/2010/02/08/booting-from-zfs-raid0156-in-freebsd/
which works just fine (as mirror).

Would have loved to use a stable branch (ie 8.2)  instead of development (9.0-CURRENT),
though. Especially for the new DELL servers with Perc H200 providing a snapshot with
the changes would be greatly appreciated!

> I don't think there are any other snapshot services still running... so (assuming
> mps(4) actually works with H200) you need to make a build of stable/8 yourself -
> the simplest approach is probably to PXE boot the servers and install by hand...
> but that's of course not a trivial thing if you never tried it before.

Well, setting up a PXE boot server just for installing one server... :-/

> I suspect there will be new official snapshots at some point, but I don't know when...

Anyway, thanks a lot for your reply. Maybe someone should update the FreeBSD website,
because there it is said that monthly snapshots will be provided for 9.x, 8.x etc.

Best regards,
Holger


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Holger Kipp
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