FreeBSD and DELL Perc H200

[Lorenzo Perone]

> Would have loved to use a stable branch (ie 8.2)  instead of development (9.0-CURRENT),
> though. Especially for the new DELL servers with Perc H200 providing a snapshot with
> the changes would be greatly appreciated!
>    

Hi Holger,

Go for 8-STABLE. Works fine for me.  No need for CURRENT for mps(4). 
Following some heavy load tests (such as concurrent, subsequent 
buildworlds while bonnie++ing around), I can also state that it is very 
stable. Have it on a DELL PowerEdge R410 with the PERC H200A adapter and 
SAS disks, and it works like a charm. I used gmirror on that, and the 
performance is awesome, provided that You tune the sysctl.conf and add: 
vfs.read_max=128 which makes sustained reads much faster (among the -b 
load default strategy when labeling the mirror).
> I don't think there are any other snapshot services still running... so (assuming
> mps(4) actually works with H200) you need to make a build of stable/8 yourself -
> the simplest approach is probably to PXE boot the servers and install by hand...
> but that's of course not a trivial thing if you never tried it before.
>    
> Well, setting up a PXE boot server just for installing one server... :-/
>
>    
It's easy if you have any other FreeBSD machine of the same architecture 
around with 8-STABLE - In fact I also did such a thing once using a 
VirtualBox running on a mac some time ago. If you need a quick setup 
guide tell me I'll send You a few commands.

You can also take one disk out, attach it to a running FreeBSD machine, 
gpart it,
cd /usr/src && make installworld DESTDIR=/mountpoint && make 
installkernel DESTDIR=/mountpoint && make distribution DESTDIR=/mountpoint
Edit the few usual suspects such as at least /mountpoint/etc/fstab and 
boot the system with the disk..



Regards,

Lorenzo