Dell PowerEdge 860 / R200 & Hardware RAID 1 (SAS5iR/SAS6iR)

ID · n00b Joined: 04 Feb 2005 Posts: 16

Does anyone has some good experience with a dell PowerEdge 860 or R200 and raid 1 (Hardware raid?)...

I want to buy an cheap Dell 1U server and put gentoo with subversion on it. I know these servers can come with redhat but I hate that inflexebility so I want to but gentoo on it. Can anyone tell me if the internal RAID controller (SAS5iR/SAS6iR) can work with RAID 1 (Hardware raid).
I will buy it with 2 SATA disks, as far as I can see the raid controller should work with these and I suppose because Dell has redhat (or is it now Ubuntu? where did I found that? :roll:

) configurations with this server the kernel has some modules for these controller?

Can anyone give me some advise? Or maybe an other kind of 1U server which will work with hw RAID1 (and gentoo of course)

Greetz,

ID

huuan · Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2008 7:20 pm Post subject:

We have a poweredge 840 with the SAS5iR controller. 2 SATA drives which I believe are in Raid 1 config, and with gentoo hardened as the OS. It has been running happily for about a year now. BUt the support for gentoo from dell is non-existent. However the support for gentoo here is the best.

When we got the box (which was not my choice) it didn't seem to need any config to work it just came as raid 1 as I recall although my memory of the exact details of 1 year ago is not that good.
There's a bunch of CDs that come with the box offering various utilities but those only work wioth the supported OSs which is like windows server 2003 etc., RHEL, and SUSE enterpise none of which are free. OTOH if you use them you get support. Right now I'm trying to figure out how to get the diagnostics running from an RHEL RPM and being a newbie in this area it is causing me quite a bit of head scratching.

Trouble is that without raid monitoring tools it doesn't do much good to have RAID 1 as the only time you find out what is happening is when it dies. Which is why I am currently trying to get the diagnostics up and running.

Here and here is back when I was setting it up

and after a quick google of 'gentoo poweredge' I found this which looks very promising as maybe the answer to my prayers. [some time later] OK I tried that and it didn't find the controller

There's also several hits for the wiki which might help.

Check it all out and let us all know what you do and how you did it, (unlike me :wink:

)

huuan · Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2008 5:47 pm Post subject:

OK after a lot of research I am at last a lot happier

with our dell poweredge 840 and its SAS 5/iR controller.
The SAS handbook was missing a vital line

about how to access the RAID properties inside the POST raid utility but after fussing around with it and rebooting about 20 times, asking on the dell poweredge list etc,etc, I tripped over how to get to the next screen quite by accident and voila! now I can at last see stuff, but only during POST.

As well as that while trying to take another approach someone from Dell pointed me to the mpt-status utility in portage which gives you a couple of status lines.
But the real find was pointed to by Wolfram, one of the Gentoo devs, in portage there is a masked package 'lsiutil' that does what the POST sas utility does and more.
I unmasked it for my box and installed it.

To make mpt-status and lsiutil go you need to add mptctl to the kernel which is under
device drivers->Fusion MPT device support-->Fusion MPT ScsiHost drivers for SPI
which sets FUSION_SPI
You toggle that and it reveals <> Fusion MPT misc device (ioctl) driver
which sets CONFIG_FUSION_CTL

and then rebooting into the new kernel you are good to go with both utilities.

Gentoo rules!

ID · n00b Joined: 04 Feb 2005 Posts: 16

Ok, after all the decisions to make I went a little impulsive and buyed the non raid R200 version. It apparently does not come with the SAS 5/6iR controller.
Because of the unpredictable future problems I decided to go for the linux software RAID 1 solution later on (with the http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Migrate_To_RAID and http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Gentoo_Install_on_Software_RAID).

Then now... I burned the Gentoo minimal live cd (2007.0 latest)... booted up.. and ... Buh....

ID · n00b Joined: 04 Feb 2005 Posts: 16

Ok, I ended up using http://www.sysresccd.org. Ubuntu was just *not* made for me.. I needed ssh... Now everything works fine. Looks like the SATA controller is the same as those of http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_Dell_PowerEdge_R200, the difference is that doesn't have the SAS hardware raid controller... Still going to use software raid I think. But i'm curious if I can still buy the RAID controller ($100 @ Dell) and if it works on this "non-raid" system..

Oh yeah, I learned something... A raid controller and a sata controller are different hardware pieces.. This was my confuse.. It seems that the raid controller "uses" the onboard SATA/SAS controller. Thus.. a PCI-E card without SAS/SATA sockets...