Re: Best 10 Gig PCIe for R900?
On Friday 08 October 2010, David Hubbard wrote: 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. I've recently tested three different 10G eth NICs on a similar platform using CentOS-5.5(x86_64). Here are the NICs with driver comments: Intel X520-da2: driver: ixgbe Built in driver good, no upgrade req. Emulex OneConnect: driver: be2net Built in driver ok, upgraded driver better (performance) NetXen NX3031: driver: nx_nic No built in driver All of these NICs performed well and =2 tcp streams reached wire speed without any tcp-tuning. I've not done extensive testing on CPU-consumption but most servers today have cores to spare, no? A 4th NIC worth considering IMO is the ConnectX from Mellanox. /Peter signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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: Disk performance drop in new RHEL 5 kernel?
On Thursday 26 August 2010, Drew Weaver wrote: Hi there, I am testing some R510s /w PERC H700 that I am going to be using for storage systems. I am using a very basic benchmark (hdparm -tT /dev/sdb) to get a relative performance number between different disks (it doesn't have to be real specific, I just need to see percentages based on different physical media). Anyway, I noticed that if I run hdparm -tT /dev/sdb on RHEL 5.4 (2.6.18-164 (megasas 04-08-RH2)) in an average of 10 runs I get 825MB/sec, however if I update the OS to 5.5 2.6.18-194.11.1 (megasas 04.17-RH1) in an average of 10 runs I get 561MB/sec. I am trying to figure out if this is a real performance decrease or if there were changes made in the new kernel or driver that would cause hdparm to have an issue getting the disks to work hard. If I reboot with the older kernel it is always around 825MB, I can reproduce this over and over. I will also note that in Fedora 13 it is also around 825MB/sec. Has anyone seen this, any thoughts? Yes, read and write some real files to see if this is an actual drop in performance. hdparm is not a good benchmark. /Peter signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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: H200
On Thursday 29 July 2010, Drew Weaver wrote: Has anyone done any testing for the H200 for various Linux distributions yet? We've done some testing on 64-bit CentOS-5.4 and 5.5. It just works (as a sas-controller, raid is only 1/0) and we got quite good performance (aggreate software raid0 12 drives r/w: 1000 MB/s / 750 MB/s). /Peter Also does anyone have any performance numbers between the H200 and the SAS 6iR? The SAS6i is well supported by pretty much every Linux distro (even old versions) but if the performance of the h200 is better it may be worth it to switch. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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: Hot disk change.
On Monday 19 April 2010, Fabio Catunda wrote: Hi, You're missing two steps below. I have a PowerEdge 1950 with a PERC 5/i Integrated controller on RAID-1 with two 232.25GB disks. I need some more disk space, so I bought two 2TB disks. What I would like to know is if it's possible to replace one HD at a time, trusting the controller to sync all data with no loss!? Assuming the rebuilds go well and you now have your raid1 on two 2T drives you'll need to expand the raid1 (if possible). The OS is a Debian Linux with ext3 fs, so after changing both disks I could use resize2fs to use the extra capacity. Before resizing the filesystem you'll have to take care of the layer beneath (partition table, lvm or similar). Anyone already tried something like that? Any tip is appreciated. Thanks, Fábio Catunda. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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: RHEL ES 3 Kernel Upgrade Issue
On Wednesday 14 April 2010, Murphy, Brian S CTR USAF AFSPC 83 NOS/Det 4 wrote: Ah - http://mirror.centos.org/centos/3/updates/i386/RPMS/ has kernel-2.4.21-63.EL.i686.rpm and kernel-smp-2.4.21-63.EL.i686.rpm both dated 4 Nov 2009 - looks good. Is there some way to know how that translates to kernel.org versions (or are they patches to 2.4.21 put out to fix CVE issues)? Vendor versions like RHEL/CentOS/SLES/whatever can't really be translated to kernel.org versions. From a base-line perspective 2.4.21-63.EL may be near 2.4.21.x but some parts are backported from much higher versions. From a security perspective you either read the RHSA (RedHat Security Announcements) and/or the rpm changelog (rpm -qp --changelog kernel...rpm). /Peter Or how other CentOS RPMs there translate to vendor versions (BIND shows 9.2.4-25, but ISC's named versions are at 9.4.x and 9.6.x, etc.)? Thanks! Brian signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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
On Tuesday 09 February 2010, William Warren wrote: On 2/9/2010 5:17 PM, howard_sho...@dell.com wrote: 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. ... This is common reasoning given for any vendor that starts practicing lock-in. Dell has just gone down that road. I'll either not buy Dell servers OR order them without your controllers and use some of my own. If they'll allow you to use non-Dell controllers... /Peter Over the years proprietary solutions are only cash cows and rarely if ever really live up to the claims put forward by the vendor. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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
On Wednesday 10 February 2010, John Oliver wrote: On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 11:36:54AM -0500, J. Epperson wrote: And UPSs! We must ensure that we have appropriately proprietarily conditioned power for our proprietary servers. And no third party replacement batteries either. Lord only knows what sort of corruption that could lead to. -- And, for our own good, we must be restricted to using Dell-branded enclosures... we can't take the risk that the holes in a lesser product might be out-of-kilter, slightly tweaking the chassis, causing memory and cards to edge out of their slots. Better get Dell-branded network cables, too. And Dell KVMs, Dell keyboards, Dell mice... Dell mousepads, too, just to absolutely ensure a positive computing experience... Be careful what you wish for. The network cable-one is already here. 10G for shorter distances now is using so called twinax cables for SFP+. One feature of SFP+ (like other transiever slots) is that it identifies what you connect. Atleast one major network equipment vendor (and I'm guessing most other too) only allows its own cables. /Peter signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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: Lifecycle Controller not-so slick IMO.
On Wednesday 27 January 2010, patrick_b...@dell.com wrote: By Console Redirection we mean serial port console redirection. The interface works fine over the iDRAC virtual KVM. This was decided since the Lifecycle Controller uses a graphical interface. At first your description seemed great but as more information trickles in it seems less and less useful. The idea to do firmware upgrades before OS is great, but feeding and triggering this has to be done in a scalable way. Why not simply upload firmware blobs (or URLs to such) to the MC/DRAC which is then applied at next reboot (result logged to SEL). Just my $0.02, Peter signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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: issues with bnx2 - NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
On our new R410, randomly when eth0 is pushing more than 30Mbps of traffic the interface sometimes times out and shuts off: ... This morning I found this post suggesting adding options bnx2 disable_msi=1 in /etc/modprobe.conf Do report back and tell us if this fixed your specific situation. /Peter Thanks, -- pjf signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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
