On 20 Dec 2007, at 07:26, kashani wrote:
Stroller wrote:
Just a quick question to see if any of the list members are using
Gentoo - or any other Linux distro for that matter - on Dell
PowerEdge 2600 or 2800 servers?
...
I used Redhat, Fedora, and Gentoo on 2550, 1650, 2650, 1750, 1850,
and 2850 PowerEdge servers ...
Blimey! You obviously know your stuff. So how do you find Gentoo
measures up to Redhat / Fedora on these machines?
Other than the CPU/RAM the main different between 2650, 2850, and
2950 was the SCSI card. I'd choose the 2850 over the 2650 given a
choice for anything with heavy I/O and the 2950 are noticeably
faster than the 2850 for our db stuff.
Ours is a 2800, and it's the 2600 that I find most readily / cheaply
available. Looks like the xx50 models are the rack-mount & lower-
profile models of the same generation. Looks like they're more
expensive secondhand and it's not obvious if hot-swap PSUs are
available?
The machines at this site aren't under high-load, so that's not
really a problem. We like this class of servers for the redundancy of
the moving-and-failure-prone kind of parts (PSU & disks).
If I might ask some follow-up questions:
Are the SCSI cards in these models the same brand / chipset / Linux
driver, please?
Or are they completely different?
The SCSI on 2850's should be megaraid and you want the megaraid-new
driver and Linux kernels would have issues if you tried to build
both new and old so just pick new. (this might have changed in the
past year since I've built a custom kernel for a 2850). I never had
driver issues with any distro provided kernel or my own kernels.
Thanks for that pointer.
IIRC you can pull the megarc RPMs from Dell's website and install
them. I never got around to making them work with Gentoo, but it
shouldn't be terribly hard. I don't know of anything in the normal
driver that will tell you any ifo about status or failed drives,
but I never looked that hard.
Hmmmn... googling a bit further I find that `megarc` are the
userspace utilities for these cards, and that they're only available
as binaries. I feel my enthusiasm for these units flagging - the cost
savings of buying secondhand aren't so much that I wouldn't rather
find a fully-OSS alternative.
I bought most of my 2850's about two years ago. Dual Xeon's, 8GB, 6
x 10k 146GB drives, and remote management card for about $4000.
Yeah, we paid £1300, I think, at about the same time. Dual Xeons &
the DRAC, but much less RAM & disk-space.
Stroller.--
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