HP Servers
R. Zoontjens
beheer at radecom.nl
Wed Oct 20 06:52:16 PDT 2004
dev web wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The company I work for use mainly FreeBSD servers, we are currently
> investigating investing in a new server with the following specs:
>
> HP ProLiant DL380 G3 - Xeon 3.06 GHz
[SNIP SPECS]
> Has anyone had any experiance running FreeBSD on a system such as this,
> My main concerns are really the Raid Array, ILo and Insight Manager, I
> know that FreeBSD has the Smart Array 5i supported through ciss, but we
> dont currently use either HP or Raid, The reseller has been as helpful
> as possible (bar giving us a server to play with) but support for
> FreeBSD at HP is obviously limited at best.
>
> Any help would be appreciated, our only other alternative is to run
> RedHat or MS which are both supported by HP, We are preared to do that,
> but would much rather continue to use FreeBSD, it has served us
> extremely well and has proved to be a solid enviroment for our
> requirements.
Hi Alex,
We recently installed freeBSD 5.2.1 on such a system to test several
things, including RAID-1 (2 disks). It was a HP DL380 G3 with the 5i
controller.
The Ilo functions are working nicely (use the trial period for the
advanced features). I configured almost everything trough Ilo remotely.
Only after having a ssh shell available, I changed to the shell. Always
being able te reboot the server is nice (even with severely damaged or
no OS).
I pulled out one of the drives, then started the server. This was
immediately noticed and the ciss0 started recovering the array (interim
recovery mode). After a while the status changed to "recovering->OK".
Everything worked just fine, except for the Tape drive. You need a
special Hot plug tapedrive for the 5i controller bay, but I could not
get it to work properly.
I found in Google: "SCSI passthrough is not supported by the CISS
driver. Are you trying to hook the tape device to the CISS controller? I
believe that will never work as the CISS driver only supports logical
arrays (of disks). I do realize that you see output from the CISS BIOS
that a device has taken a certain ID, but I'm pretty sure it will not
allow the OS to recognize it. My advice would be to stick in another
controller!"
Be aware that the server does not have normal power-connectors (ours
didn't). So trying another -internal- scsi tape drive will probably not
work.
I somebody finds an answer to the HP Hot-plug tapedrive + ciss driver,
I'd like to hear it!
Good luck!!!
with kind regards,
Richard Zoontjens
-----------------------
Radécom B.V.
E: richard at radecom.nl
I: www.radecom.nl
-----------------------
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