Dell PowerEge 2850 and RAID

[Stephane Raimbault]

I also have a Dell PowerEdge 2850 with the PERC 4e/Di Raid card and I  
found some interesting information tonight that will help us all out.

http://www.freebsd.org/news/press.html#story200505:02

Basically, LSI now supports FreeBSD and 5.4 seems to have the updated  
drivers... so what does this mean?

Well, I discovered that the PERC 4e/Di Raid card is the same thing as  
the LSI MegaRAID 320-2X.  So if you go to www.lsilogic.com and go to  
the download section and find the downloads for the "LSI MegaRAID  
320-2x" you will see that there is a "driver" for FreeBSD.

Download this file and unzip the contents.  Inside there is a file  
called "MegaRC 1.04.zip"  Unzip that and you will have a file called  
"megarc" make the file executable "chmod +x megarc" and run the  
command "./megarc -option"

This will give you some options that you can play with.

So far I've discovered the following useful information:

./megarc -AllAdpInfo
     This shows all your supported adapters.  In my case it found the  
following:

         AdapterNo  FirmwareType  CardType
         00          40LD/8SPAN    PERC 4/DC


I then did this to display the status/configuration of the controller:

./megarc -dispCfg -a0

         Finding Devices On Each MegaRAID Adapter...
       Scanning Ha 0, Chnl 1 Target 15

           Logical Drive : 0( Adapter: 0 ):  Status: OPTIMAL
         ---------------------------------------------------
         SpanDepth :01     RaidLevel: 1  RdAhead : Adaptive  Cache:  
DirectIo
         StripSz   :064KB   Stripes  : 2  WrPolicy: WriteBack

         Logical Drive 0 : SpanLevel_0 Disks
         Chnl  Target  StartBlock   Blocks      Physical Target Status
         ----  ------  ----------   ------      ----------------------
         0      00    0x00000000   0x043bc000   ONLINE
         0      01    0x00000000   0x043bc000   ONLINE


           Logical Drive : 1( Adapter: 0 ):  Status: OPTIMAL
         ---------------------------------------------------
         SpanDepth :02     RaidLevel: 1  RdAhead : Adaptive  Cache:  
DirectIo
         StripSz   :064KB   Stripes  : 2  WrPolicy: WriteBack

         Logical Drive 1 : SpanLevel_0 Disks
         Chnl  Target  StartBlock   Blocks      Physical Target Status
         ----  ------  ----------   ------      ----------------------
         1      02    0x00000000   0x0887c000   ONLINE
         1      03    0x00000000   0x0887c000   ONLINE

         Logical Drive 1 : SpanLevel_1 Disks
         Chnl  Target  StartBlock   Blocks      Physical Target Status
         ----  ------  ----------   ------      ----------------------
         1      04    0x00000000   0x0887c000   ONLINE
         1      05    0x00000000   0x0887c000   ONLINE


This correctly shows my 2 logical drives.

Logical drive 0 (raid 1 between 2 36Gig 10K disks)
     Drive 00 and 01

Logical drive 1 (raid 1 and spanned between 4 72Gig 15K disks)
     Drive 02 and 03 spanned with
     Drive 04 and 05




Might I say...   EXCITING times for Dell SCSI RAID owners


Cheers,
Stephane


On 22-Jun-05, at 8:26 AM, Danny Cooper wrote:

> We have the PE2850 with PERC 4e/Di controller but this can not be  
> monitored
> through FreeBSD, I am currently looking at a Drac4 to send traps  
> out to
> another server for monitoring purposes.
>
> Danny
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-hardware at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-hardware at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Alex Zbyslaw
> Sent: 22 June 2005 14:49
> To: freebsd-hardware at freebsd.org
> Subject: Dell PowerEge 2850 and RAID
>
> I'd really like to get some concrete information about RAID management
> under FreeBSD/i386 (5.4) on a Dell PowerEdge 2850.  I don't have this
> machine, but it is looking very likely that a client will be  
> getting one
> and I'd like to have positive things to say about running FreeBSD  
> on it.
>
> My major concern is how to monitor the RAID status without  
> resorting to
> looking at the LEDs flash on the disks (*).  Ideally, I'd like to be
> able to run something from a cron job which told me that everything  
> was
> OK.  If errors were logged to /var/log/messages or similar, that would
> be a nice plus.
>
> As far as I can tell, the machine could have either an LSI 53C1030
> controller or a Dell PERC 4e/Di controller.
>
> For the LSI I can see that it is supported by the mtp driver, but can
> find nothing else.
>
> For the Dell PERC 4e/Di (a different LSI, I believe) it seems to be
> supported by the amr driver and I have found various references out
> there to these working under FreeBSD, but nothing specifically about
> monitoring the RAID.
>
> If anyone can provide some concrete information, I'd be grateful.  I
> have also explored the Dell and LSI sites, but neither appear to  
> let you
> browse their downloads unless you are a registered customer.
>
> Thanks,
>
> --Alex
>
> (*) For a short saga on a RAID which didn't, and no-one knew about it,
> see
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2005-June/ 
> 090786.html
>
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