hp ProLiant DL360 G4 or G5 on FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE?

[Christoph Schug]

On Fri, Jul 14, 2006, Oliver Fromme wrote:

> Joakim Platbarzdis <joakim at nobleentertainment.com> wrote:
>  > I'm planning on deploying a server using FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE.
>  > 
>  > What is your suggestion, should I go for hp ProLiant DL360 G4 or is  
>  > there any sense in waiting for G5, that will be available to me  
>  > within a few weeks?
>  > 
>  > Any compatability issues to look forward to? I know very little of  
>  > FreeBSD (this is my first attempt).
> 
> We're running 6.1 on DL360 G2, G3 and G4 for several weeks.
> No issues so far, except there doesn't seem to be a way to
> monitor the hardware (fans and temperature) under FreeBSD.
> (G5 vs. G4 shouldn't make a difference in that regard,
> though.)

The SAS models of generation G4 and all G5 have SAS RAID controllers.
While at least some of them should be supported be ciss(4) as well, I
would rather stick to DL360 G4 SCSI model since its SmartArray 6i RAID
controller is well tested. BTW don't forget to order the optional so
called BBWC battery-backed write cache enabler if you rely on good write
performance. Without it, the controller cache is used to read operations
only as data consistency cannot be guaranteed without the BBWC's battery
in case of power outage.

As already said, monitoring of fans, temperature and power supplies does
not work (luckily outages are *very* seldom). Hard drive outages are
being reported by the ciss(4) driver ...

Some excerpt from /var/log/messages:

Disk of a RAID 1 logical drive fails:
| Jul  7 07:59:41 XXX kernel: ciss0: *** Physical drive failure: SCSI port 2 ID 0
| Jul  7 07:59:41 XXX kernel: ciss0: *** State change, logical drive 0
| Jul  7 07:59:41 XXX kernel: ciss0: logical drive 0 (da0) changed status OK ->interim recovery, spare status 0x0

Pulled broken disk:
| Jul  7 08:16:23 XXX kernel: ciss0: *** Hot-plug drive removed: SCSI port 2 ID 0

Inserted fresh disk, resync starts automatically:
| Jul  7 08:17:42 XXX kernel: ciss0: *** Hot-plug drive inserted: SCSI port 2 ID 0
| Jul  7 08:17:42 XXX kernel: ciss0: *** State change, logical drive 0
| Jul  7 08:17:42 XXX kernel: ciss0: logical drive 0 (da0) changed status interim recovery->ready for recovery, spare status 0x0
| Jul  7 08:17:42 XXX kernel: ciss0: *** State change, logical drive 0
| Jul  7 08:17:42 XXX kernel: ciss0: logical drive 0 (da0) changed status ready for recovery->recover ing, spare status 0x0

Resync done:
| Jul  7 08:53:27 XXX kernel: ciss0: *** State change, logical drive 0
| Jul  7 08:53:27 XXX kernel: ciss0: logical drive 0 (da0) changed status recovering->OK, spare status 0x0

BTW if space and money permits, I would go for the DL385 since the
Opteron CPUs run much cooler than the Xeons and give you superior
performance. In difference to the DL360, the DL380 (Xeon-based) and
DL380 (Opteron-based) are easier to expand and much more reliable when
it comes to the fans. Due to its larger diameter they can ran at lower
revs.

-cs