rhel4 and dl320 embedded sata raid
Written by jlgaddis on June 13, 2006 – 12:04 am -I had a fun time getting the Adaptec Embedded SATA RAID card on a new HP Proliant DL320 server recently. Well, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, that is.
Supposedly, RHEL4 Update 2 has built-in support for the “adpahci” driver, which is needed for the above-mentioned embedded SATA RAID card to work. This appeared not to be the case. It also not to be the case for RHEL4 Update 3. Indeed, I had to “fall back” to RHEL4 Update 1 and use a driver disk that I obtained from HP’s web site in order to get RHEL4 to see the card.
Without the driver, RHEL4 sees each of the two 80GB SATA disks individually and I could’ve done software RAID1, but I really want to avoid doing software RAID when I can do hardware RAID… and if the card’s already then, what’s the point?
Finally, using the driver disk alongside RHEL4 Update 1, the Adaptec card is detected, Red Hat sees the RAID1 logical volume that I set up and I can continue on. Got the base system installed right before I left today and am actually updating it now from home.
This box, along with another just like it (configured in failover using heartbeat) will replace an HP ML370 G2 currently running IIS5 on Windows 2000. The current server is running a total of five websites and doing an okay job, but I managed to convince the “powers that be” and that can run them just as well, if not better (of course) on Linux, and do more with them than what we are now. I actually got the “ok” to go ahead with that. After some initial testing with RHEL4, heartbeat, and rsync, I had a good PoC and was ready to move on it. This DL320 is the first part of the transition. I’m aiming for mid-July for moving four of the five websites over and mid-August for the last one (the most complicated). There are a few apps that are Windows-specific that we won’t be able to run on Linux, but those can stick around on the current server.
Anyways, long story short, the Adaptec embedded SATA RAID shit is a pain in the ass. Well, it was, anyways.
Tags: linux, vendors | No Comments »
June 18th, 2006 at 8:27 pm
We’ve been using a DL320G4 for a bit as an internal web app server, monitoring server for Windows Logs, a CVS repo and such.
You may want to consider going to the Software RAID solution on the box. I am fairly certain if it is using the Intel 82801GR (ICH7R) controller then it isn’t really using hardware RAID, but implementing it via the driver. So you end up with Software RAID using a proprietary solution.
Assuming the above is true, Linux software RAID will probably prove to have better documentation and more information should things go wrong with one of the disks in the future and you need to recover.
Here is a good link on FRAID:
http://thebs413.blogspot.com/2005/09/fake-raid-fraid-sucks-even-more-at.html
I am still looking forward to hearing how the move from the IIS box to a Linux box goes!
September 6th, 2006 at 11:33 am
Jeremy,
The Sata disks from HP supports RHEL4 Update 2 now. I just tried it on my new DL320 G4 Server and it works.
With update 4 out now, I wish HP was on the ball and would atleast support Update3.
Kim
March 6th, 2007 at 4:53 pm
Gday, just been through this myself, on a DL320 G5, and had to go back a version or two on the driver.
I have RHEL 4 Update 2, and could not get the installer to grab the driver from floppy. I tried one from the HP site (DL320 G5 drivers section), and the one from the “Proliant Essentials Foundation Pack” that comes with teh box, but neither gave me any joy. Did a bit of a search and found that this driver adpahci-1.2.5552.rhel4qu2.i686.img did the trick.
The HP site gives you adpahci-1.2.5571-1.rhel4.i686.dd.gz, which did not work for me.
November 26th, 2007 at 8:13 am
Who know, how to install Red Hat on Hp Embedded Raid Volume? i have driver disk, but it not works when i install OS.