[Opinions Wanted] Dell PowerEdge 2950 Servers ...

Bill Moran wmoran at collaborativefusion.com
Fri Jan 26 13:59:44 UTC 2007


In response to "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy at freebsd.org>:
> 
> Have a friend that swears by them, but ... he's in the Linux camp, so tends to 
> have a quasi-inside track ...
> 
> What are ppls opinions on them as far as FreeBSD is concerned?
> 
> Also, interested in what sort of specs ppl are running ... I'm interested in 
> going with an 8xSAS drive system, dual-dual-core, figuring 10 or 16G of RAM ... 
> redundant power and the Dell Remote Access Card ...

We have 4 1950s and 3 2950s in use around here.  Only one is actually in
production so far, the rest are still being configured, etc.

We're mostly happy with them.  The following is a list of caveats:

*) The version 5 DRAC is nicer than the version 4, _except_ that you have
   to use a Windows client to connect to it.  May not be an issue for you,
   but all our admins here use FreeBSD on their workstations :(
*) There's an issue where the systems will hang on reboot about 50% of the
   time.  I tried to track this down but found that if I added any debugging
   code, the problem disappeared :(  It's not a big deal for three reasons --
   we don't reboot servers very often, the hang occurs after the disks
   are synced so it doesn't trigger an fsck, and we have DRAC cards in
   all of them :)
*) The new PERC controllers use the mfi driver, which works well as far as
   we can tell ... unfortunately, there's no equivalent to megarc (which we
   use with 1850 and 2950 systems) so we have been unable to come up with
   a way to monitor the health of the RAID arrays from within the OS.
*) Make sure you use a recent version of FreeBSD (6.2).  The NIC cards on
   these use the bge driver, which was buggy as hell prior to 6.2.

The biggest benefit we noticed when moving from the x850 to the x950 systems
is that the IPMI and DRAC cards perform much better.  It's a shame that Dell
decided to use ActiveX for the v5 DRAC :(

-- 
Bill Moran
Collaborative Fusion Inc.


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