HP Servers

[Olaf Hoyer]

On Wed, 20 Oct 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>
>
> 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.

Hi!

Have some of them here, that are deployed with Win2003, and I had some 
time to make some short tests.

results: Hardware is supported quite nicely, a tape drive (which we 
don't need because of central tape library) should always be hooked up 
to a different non-RAID card IMHO, iLO also is working nice, but:
For some management functions those boxes rely on SNMP, and AFAIK there 
are no FreeBSD agents avaiable for FreeBSD. WIth them (Insight Manager) 
installed, I do hardware monitoring for defective HDD, fans, etc. with a 
nagios box.

I had a short glance at the RedHat SNMP agents, but even unpacking them 
on FreeBSD was a major pain, so I assume you have to live without deeper 
insight in what your box does. IIRC the iLO in its event log relies upon 
those information, so it might occur that not every information (when 
ECC errors occur etc.) might end up in the iLO log.

Otherwise, they are in the process in integrating ssh access in the iLO 
(have 1.62 running here), so that you can remote powercycle/light the 
uid LED remotely via ssh, and may forward a text console via ssh and 
there is no need to use the java applet in a webbrowser for that.


I used FreeBSD 4.8 on a 360G2 some time for netsaint monitoring, and 
there the ciss was quite stable, no hassle at all (ok, it was quite slow 
with lots of small files, because the writeback enabler was not 
installed)

HTH
Olaf


-- 
Olaf Hoyer        ohoyer at ohoyer.de
Fuerchterliche Erlebniss geben zu raten,
ob der, welcher sie erlebt, nicht etwas Fuerchterliches ist.
(Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Boese)