H800 CLI location?
I can't seem to find the linux cli tools for managing the H800 controller anymore; I used to just go to a server that came with one and could grab it from the raid sas category but nothing there currently for an R900 and redhat. Thanks, David ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
Best 10 Gig PCIe for R900?
Hi all, I've got an R900 with four six-core cpu's that will be doing Symantec NetBackup backing up and de-duplication duties over ten gig via a Cisco 4900M so it's going to need to be a fiber card, short range. Any recommendations on best NIC for the job, i.e. best throughput and lowest resource utilization? OS is RHEL 5 and ideally I'd like to stick with the built in drivers but if necessary I can replace them, I just hate dealing with 3rd-party drivers and kernel patches and rebooting with no networking, etc. Thanks, David ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
RE: R300 auto negotiation
-Original Message- From: linux-poweredge-boun...@dell.com [mailto:linux-poweredge-boun...@dell.com] On Behalf Of Robin Bowes Sent: Thursday, July 22, 2010 7:23 PM To: linux-poweredge@dell.com Subject: Re: R300 auto negotiation How are you determining that it is only running at 10-half? I had an issue some time ago (different NIC, different driver) where I thought that the NICs were not running at Gb speed, but it turned out that mii-diag didn't report the correct information., but ethtool did. Was getting horrible transfer rates and then confirmed it was 10-half via ethtool, the switch did match at 10 but thought it was full. -Original Message- From: linux-poweredge-boun...@dell.com [mailto:linux-poweredge-boun...@dell.com] On Behalf Of Shaun Qualheim Sent: Thursday, July 22, 2010 7:49 PM To: Robin Bowes Cc: linux-poweredge@dell.com Subject: Re: R300 auto negotiation Most of the time when this has happened to us, it's been more of a switch issue. Have you used these switch ports with other PowerEdge servers before? Yeah, we use all Foundry FES9604 96-port 10/100 switches at the edge and have 400+ various PowerEdge servers plugged into them and the only server on any of the switches that has ever had a negotiation issue has been this one R300, and it did replace a first gen PE1950 on the same port which negotiated fine. We only have one other R300 out of all the servers, but it's CentOS 4 and x86 and negotiates fine, as opposed to the one with the problem being CentOS 5 x86_64, and probably about nine months difference in manufacture date, so not sure if any of those factors made the difference. Thanks, Dave ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
R300 auto negotiation
Has anyone had issues with R300's and the stock CentOS 5.5 x86_64 tg3 driver not auto negotiating properly? We use Foundry (aka Brocade) switches and I have an R300 that insists on negotiating to 10-half, I had to use ethtool to force it to 100-full. Have not tried at gig. Would prefer to not have to hard code since we dislike having to hard code switch ports for other reasons. Thanks, David ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
Some MD1200 tuning info
Just wanted to share some info I accumulated on the MD1200 and H800 controller while testing and configuring a disk deduplication media server for a NetBackup installation. The performance of the H800 was atrocious while the background initialization was running, so don't put an array into production while it's still doing that if you require good performance. In fact, if the performance is similar when it is rebuilding, that may be an issue for some people too because it was literally a factor of eight slower than after initialization finally completed. I initialized an array of (10) 2 TB 7200 rpm SAS drives with two hot spares in an MD1200 connected to an H800 controller via dual-paths on a T710 server and it took about three days total to finish initialization. The array is configured as RAID 50 across the ten drives with what ended up being a 128k stripe size. To test, I used the Bonnie++ disk benchmarking tool because it pretty closely simulates the type of load NetBackup puts on a server when doing disk-based backup with deduplication. The external array is about 16 TB usable after formatting, it's partitioned with parted and I tested on CentOS 5.4 latest kernel and both XFS and EXT3 with a combination of 64k and 128k stripe sizes on the hardware side, ended up with 128k as it was faster for this testing. I used the bonnie defaults so on this 40 GB server, it ended up testing with an 80 GB data set. The results: 1) XFS with hardware read ahead: 455 MB/sec write, 675 MB/sec read, 97 MB/sec random rewrite, 397 random seeks/sec. 2) XFS with hardware adaptive read ahead: 218 MB/sec write, 290 MB/sec read, 40 MB/sec random rewrite, 431 random seeks/sec. 3) EXT3 with hardware read ahead: 510 MB/sec write, 633 MB/sec read, 187 MB/sec random rewrite, 796 random seeks/sec. 4) EXT3 with hardware adaptive read ahead: 507 MB/sec write, 632 MB/sec read, 205 MB/sec random rewrite, 887 random seeks/sec. I was kind of surprised at that, I had expected XFS to be a lot better, perhaps there are mkfs or mount options I need to play with but I didn't do anything special to EXT3 either. I have not disabled atime in the mount. So then I come across this article: http://thias.marmotte.net/archives/2008/01/05/Dell-PERC5E-and-MD1000-per formance-tweaks.html and it advises of the blockdev command and adjusting the read ahead value. I tried a few options and setting it to 8192 achieved the best result, which changed my EXT3 with adaptive read ahead to 516 MB/sec write, 959 MB/sec read (!!), 292 MB/sec random rewrite, 806 random seek/sec. I did try the starting sector alignment stuff too, serious PITA when using parted, but it didn't make a significant difference. Should be noted that while XFS was a lot slower for my particular configuration, the CPU usage under writing was about half what it was with EXT3, so that may be a factor for some. I'd also expect less dramatic figures on servers handling lots of small files, maybe that is where XFS shines too; for a backup de-dupe server it is a lot of large files. Dave ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
R900 crashing under NFS
Got an R900 with four six-core processors running latest centos 5, all stock updates so kernel is 2.6.18-164.15.1.el5PAE. Using built-in NIC at 100 Mbit, bnx2 driver. Under heavy NFS from just one client the server kernel panics. We're really just using the server to move some files off a vmware system so I just did a fresh centos install, ran the updates, set up nfs server with the default options and one exported directory and went on our way. Are there some known issues with the bnx2 driver or the latest centos/rhel kernel and nfs? Thanks, David ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
RE: External array showing as /dev/sda
From: Behalf Of J. Epperson I'm somehow missing how getting the non-installable smaller GPT VD to be /dev/sda will change that scenario. The other responder echoed one of my initial thoughts when he suggested turning off the external array. That should do it. If I could get the internal raid controller to be /dev/sda, then the RHEL/centos installer will not care about the fact that the external array is too big and would require GPT to boot off of, then the installer would let me proceed. It was only an issue with it being /dev/sda since that made the installer think there was no way to writen an MBR and boot off of it. But, unplugging external did lead me the right direcation. What I've had to do is this: 1) Internal array I had desired to be single RAID 50 across 8 drives. Thanks to Dell's choice of LSI for their current raid controllers and LSI missing the feature that most others seem to have in being able to present parts of one array as multiple logical drives, I ended up having to waste the first two drives to make a RAID 1 mirror smaller than 2 TB and then only six remaining drives in the RAID 50. 2) Unplugged the external array and installed centos using normal non-GPT boot to the raid 1 virtual drive. It installed to /dev/sda. 3) After install, edit /boot/grub/device.map and changed it to show: (hd0) /dev/sdb Then: grub grub device (hd0) /dev/sda device (hd0) /dev/sda grub root (hd0,0) root (hd0,0) Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83 grub setup (hd0) setup (hd0) Checking if /boot/grub/stage1 exists... no Checking if /grub/stage1 exists... yes Checking if /grub/stage2 exists... yes Checking if /grub/e2fs_stage1_5 exists... yes Running embed /grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)... 15 sectors are embedded. succeeded Running install /grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+15 p (hd0,0)/grub/stage2 /grub/grub.conf... succeeded Done. 4) Reboot, connect external array while server is rebooting, comes back up and boots off of internal array from bios, grub is happy because now it is set up for /dev/sdb. Only downside to this situation is if something were to fail and take the external array down the server won't boot since internal will go back to being /dev/sda. But if the external array is down then we've got issues anyway. :-) Thanks, David ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
RE: External array showing as /dev/sda
From: Stephan van Hienen [mailto:stephan.van.hie...@thevalley.nl] No sure which controller you have, but with the perc5/6 you can create multiple virtual disks ? I have one PE2950 server with a Perc5i with 6 * 750GB drives, with a 150gb boot vdisk, and a 3TB vdisk. (raid5) When doing raid 50 the H200/700/800-series controllers do not let you do that, the virtual disk size box becomes a fixed value. I think it may let you do that on some other raid types. David ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
External array showing as /dev/sda
Got a PowerEdge T510 with internal raid plus an H800 controller hooked to an MD1200 external array. Trying to install centos; raid controllers are bus 2 device 0 internal bus 7 device 0 external During setup its identifying /dev/sda as external storage which I don't want. Is there anything I can tweak to make it detect the storage in an order that results in the internal being /dev/sda? Thanks, David ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
RE: External array showing as /dev/sda
From: linux-poweredge-boun...@dell.com Probably. But it may not be worth it. Why does it matter to you? Not saying that it doesn't matter, just trying to understand why. Getting it to be /dev/sda during install, for instance, wouldn't guarantee that it would be that when you booted the installed kernel. Because I can't figure out how to get the OS installed otherwise. As it stands currently, I would like to use RAID 50 on both the internal and external arrays. Dell's raid controllers do not allow you to create anything other than one logical drive presenting 100% of the physical raid 50 array size to the OS as a drive, so basically this means my external /dev/sda drive shows as 24 TB, my internal /dev/sdb drive shows as 4.5 TB. So, trying to install RHEL 5.4 x86_64, the LVM wizard cranks up and since the external array is /dev/sda I un-check the box to tell the installer to not look at that 'drive'. I leave /dev/sdb checked which is my 4.5 TB internal drive. Proceed and then the installer tells me my boot drive is managed by GPT but the system cannot boot with GPT and I'm done. As far as I can tell there is not currently a supported way to get RHEL 5 installed with the server in UEFI boot mode, or at least I can't figure it out, I did try putting it in UEFI mode but it refused to boot off an ISO on DVD or a native DVD. So you can't boot off a GPT drive and you can't install to a MBR drive lol. As best I can tell, this leaves me with the only option being get internal to show as /dev/sda, waste a bunch of money by being forced to reconfigure that array as a RAID 1 of two drives for the sole purpose of being able to present a 'drive' of less than 2 TB to the OS so RHEL will install on it using MBR as /dev/sda, do the remaining six disks as RAID 50 and let them become /dev/sdb, keep the external array as RAID 50 /dev/sdc now. I can't accomplish this without the internal raid controller being /dev/sda though so the installer will make it past the partitioning step. Also quite unhappy that the two 750 GB drives that should have been part of my RAID 50 internal will effectively be used to store about 2 GB of boot and OS files but I think I'm stuck. David There's a seminal paper by Matt Domsch of Dell, about Linux device naming at http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/power/ps1q07-20060392-Domsch.pdf That might give some insight. It's several years old, but pretty much still valid, although UUIDs seem to be displacing labels for identifying partitions for mounting. I still use labels. ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
RE: Third-party drives not permitted on Gen 11 servers
I'd be more inclined to buy into the whitepaper and the idea behind it if it were not for the fact that Dell servers continue to come with whatever random hard drive model and manufacturer Dell can get at a low price; I don't believe there is any special evaluation of manufacturers quality and/or performance, either that or the standards are so low that every model passes. I don't know one week to the next what the hard drive flavor of the week will be when a new server arrives. Additionally, as someone who has 500+ servers in production, we regularly have Dell branded drives die and if the server is out of warranty, we throw the same model drive bought off the street into it. I have to say I've not had any indication that the Dell drives have been more reliable, if anything less reliable since they buy up whatever a manufacturer is willing to make a deal on at a given time. I'm glad this thread came up though, I could have been in a bad spot if it had not; we have hundreds of Dell servers and buy third party drives simply to have as spare parts so when a drive fails we can throw a new one in immediately instead of waiting four hours or next day depending on a server's support contract. I guess now I have to buy Dell spare part drives so I don't end up screwed. David -Original Message- From: linux-poweredge-boun...@dell.com [mailto:linux-poweredge-boun...@dell.com] On Behalf Of howard_sho...@dell.com Sent: Tuesday, February 09, 2010 5:18 PM To: linux-powere...@lists.us.dell.com Subject: RE: Third-party drives not permitted on Gen 11 servers Thank you very much for your comments and feedback regarding exclusive use of Dell drives. It is common practice in enterprise storage solutions to limit drive support to only those drives which have been qualified by the vendor. In the case of Dell's PERC RAID controllers, we began informing customers when a non-Dell drive was detected with the introduction of PERC5 RAID controllers in early 2006. With the introduction of the PERC H700/H800 controllers, we began enabling only the use of Dell qualified drives. There are a number of benefits for using Dell qualified drives in particular ensuring a positive experience and protecting our data. While SAS and SATA are industry standards there are differences which occur in implementation. An analogy is that English is spoken in the UK, US and Australia. While the language is generally the same, there are subtle differences in word usage which can lead to confusion. This exists in storage subsystems as well. As these subsystems become more capable, faster and more complex, these differences in implementation can have greater impact. Benefits of Dell's Hard Disk and SSD drives are outlined in a white paper on Dell's web site at http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pvaul/en/dell-ha rd-drives-pov.pdf -Original Message- From: linux-poweredge-bounces-Lists On Behalf Of Philip Tait Sent: Friday, February 05, 2010 4:31 PM To: linux-poweredge-Lists Subject: Third-party drives not permitted on Gen 11 servers I just received my first Gen11 server, R710, with H700 PERC. I removed the supplied drives, and installed 4 Barracuda ES.2s. After doing a Clear Configuration in the pre-boot RAID setup utility, I can perform no operation with the drives - they are marked as blocked. Is Dell preventing the use of 3rd-party HDDs now? Thanks for any enlightenment. Philip J. Tait http://subarutelescope.org ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
