x3550 ServeRAID-8k and FBSD 7, group limit

[Yury Michurin]

We are currently considering to purchase IBM x3550 with ServeRAID-8k, in
order to run FreeBSD 7 with RAID5,
but it is very unclear from what I've saw on the Internet, whether the
driver support on FreeBSD is stable enough for production use,
and I've left with many questions unanswered, with which I hope you'll be
kind to help me =)


1. Is FreeBSD supports the device right after install or I need to recompile
the kernel?
2. Is tools for manage the RAID available? If no, how you rebuild the array
on drive failure (and how to detect it)?

I've just remember i had another unanswered question, not related to x3550:
3. When I've used FreeBSD 6.2, it had a limitation, that a user can be
member only of N groups (don't remember exactly, i think N = 15),
however i couldn't find any official documentation of that issue, nor if it
still exists in FBSD 7, so is it? =)


Thank you very much for your time,
Yury Michurin.