ZFS on Dell with FreeBSD

[Eduardo]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 1:36 PM, Sergio de Almeida Lenzi
<lenzi.sergio at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have several dells with the perc controller
> and I can say that the best solution is
> to user raid 0 (see both disks) and let
> zfs to mirror them..
>
> This works ok, and you can use the zfs tools to
> manage the disks.
>
> Howerver this does not solve the problem that I
> had with the perc controller..

Hi,

I have one observation regarding a similar situation ... if I am using
the perc to create a mirror of the 2 boot disks (using UFS) ... and
the perc crashes / die or gets replaced ... I use to think that I
could boot from the individual disk ... since in this case the data is
there and does not need the perc to see it .... is this correct ? or
you think that I will not be able to boot the system ? (or even if it
is not the boot disk ... I should be able to mount one of the drives
anyway... )

Thanks!

> The problem is that all the storage you have is
> in the perc controller, even it is reliable, when
> it "breaks", all of your storage (and so the computer...)
> is useless.  You cannot move the drives (HD) to another
> machine because the "normal"  controller (ad, ada) will
> not recognize the disk.
>
> Even if you have a spare perc controller of the same kind
> at hand (and I bet you do not have...)  the disks are
> "signed"  by the other (the broken) controller  and so
> will not be recognized by the new controller.
>
> In my case I had to call dell support, and only after
> several hours I could put the HD  online again.
>
> I mount only one disk (of the zfs pool) in the new
> controller, and even with the dell support in the phone
> the new controller wipe out the disk.
> A new call (with a different dell support) was able to
> re-initialize the disk, that includes re-install Freebsd...
> and after that "attach" the old disk, and using zpool detatch,
> followed by zpool attach (the old disk), it than reconstruct
> the mirror...  resulting in almost 6 hour downtime
> and a loss of one day working for the hole company.
>
> Now, a dell support (here) does not attend you  if you say
> that the OS is FreeBSD, you must say to them that you are
> installing Linux... to get the support.
>
> Conclusion:   now I prefer the IBM 32XX series...
>
> Ok
> that is my story
>
>
> Sergio.
>
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