I'll comment on some of this. 1) I don't have any information on this. 2) I know they work on PERC 6, SAS 6, PERC H700, PERC H800, and PERC H200. I'm not positive about others. They don't work as a boot volume without a UEFI BIOS. (PowerEdge RX1X, PowerEdge TX1X, or PowerEdge MX1X have this as an option) 3) This works for non-spanned RAID Levels (i.e. 0, 1, 5, and 6). You also are restricted to using the same RAID level per disk group. So multiple RAID 5's per a disk group, not a RAID 5 and a RAID 6 on the same disk group. 4) Not supported.
-----Original Message----- From: linux-poweredge-bounces-Lists On Behalf Of Dominic Lepiane Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2010 1:47 PM To: linux-poweredge-Lists Subject: RAID controller features Hi list, We've got a bunch of different PowerEdge servers running various operating systems, and recently I've been banging my head against the wall with make some changes to the various RAIDs. What do you guys have for feedback on what features are available from what RAID controllers? For example, I have a PE2900 with a PERC 5/i. It's got a RAID1 for OS plus a RAID5 for data. I tried growing the data RAID by upgrading the disk sizes only to find that after much fiddling and searching Online that some people report the upgrade "just works" and others say "it just doesn't". So fine, I've blown away the data RAID and built it anew by hand only silly me, I started off with a similar amount of storage first (fewer but larger drives) so then I had to expand the array by adding another disk. Now this worked in that the array grew and OM now shows "2,793.00GB" but the OS (CentOS 5.4 x64) does not, it shows 1.999TB: [r...@host ~]# parted /dev/sdb p Model: DELL PERC 5/i (scsi) Disk /dev/sdb: 1999GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: gpt Number Start End Size File system Name Flags 1 17.4kB 1999GB 1999GB Now on another server, an R710 with a PERC 6/i, I figured rather than get burned by a 2TB limit, I would cleverly in the RAID BIOS put together the RAID with multiple (sub-2TB) Virtual Disks. That didn't work in the RAID BIOS and when I called Dell support thinking maybe this was a bug with the BIOS or some odd hardware fault, support said that multiple VDs on a single array wasn't "supported" though once we loaded an OS (Windows Server 2008) on there with OM, that was exactly the configuration we were able to do (two VDs on one array). So I guess I'd like to know if Dell offers any products that have the following features and under what configurations they work: 1) Array expansion by replacing smaller disks with larger ones 2) Arrays over 2TB in size 3) Carving of arrays into multiple VDs (or auto-carving any arrays into 2TB and smaller VDs) 4) More sophisticated operations like dropping disks from arrays where not all array space is used by VDs I'd definitely like to know about internal storage like PERC or those H200/H700 (I haven't used any of these yet), but I'd also like to hear your feedback on direct attached (MD1000 etc) or SAN (Equilogic? ) Thanks, - Dominic _______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list [email protected] https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq _______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list [email protected] https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
