Re: [Opinions Wanted] Dell PowerEdge 2950 Servers ...
In response to Marc G. Fournier [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Have a friend that swears by them, but ... he's in the Linux camp, so tends to have a quasi-inside track ... What are ppls opinions on them as far as FreeBSD is concerned? Also, interested in what sort of specs ppl are running ... I'm interested in going with an 8xSAS drive system, dual-dual-core, figuring 10 or 16G of RAM ... redundant power and the Dell Remote Access Card ... We have 4 1950s and 3 2950s in use around here. Only one is actually in production so far, the rest are still being configured, etc. We're mostly happy with them. The following is a list of caveats: *) The version 5 DRAC is nicer than the version 4, _except_ that you have to use a Windows client to connect to it. May not be an issue for you, but all our admins here use FreeBSD on their workstations :( *) There's an issue where the systems will hang on reboot about 50% of the time. I tried to track this down but found that if I added any debugging code, the problem disappeared :( It's not a big deal for three reasons -- we don't reboot servers very often, the hang occurs after the disks are synced so it doesn't trigger an fsck, and we have DRAC cards in all of them :) *) The new PERC controllers use the mfi driver, which works well as far as we can tell ... unfortunately, there's no equivalent to megarc (which we use with 1850 and 2950 systems) so we have been unable to come up with a way to monitor the health of the RAID arrays from within the OS. *) Make sure you use a recent version of FreeBSD (6.2). The NIC cards on these use the bge driver, which was buggy as hell prior to 6.2. The biggest benefit we noticed when moving from the x850 to the x950 systems is that the IPMI and DRAC cards perform much better. It's a shame that Dell decided to use ActiveX for the v5 DRAC :( -- Bill Moran Collaborative Fusion Inc. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Opinions Wanted] Dell PowerEdge 2950 Servers ...
Have a friend that swears by them, but ... he's in the Linux camp, so tends to have a quasi-inside track ... What are ppls opinions on them as far as FreeBSD is concerned? Also, interested in what sort of specs ppl are running ... I'm interested in going with an 8xSAS drive system, dual-dual-core, figuring 10 or 16G of RAM ... redundant power and the Dell Remote Access Card ... My personal experience with Dell is that it's ok until you hit a problem. Then it's hell. So bad, in fact, that we don't purchase them anymore and have gone with IBM and HP systems for our FreeBSD, RedHat and Windows machines. IMHO, the problem with Dell is not their hardware, but their support (or lack of it). If you plan on running your Business on Dell, be prepared for Incredibly bad and horrible support. Be it consumer product support or Enterprise 24/7/365 type support. Dell support is a total waste of money and time, but a superb source of frustration. (so if you're looking to get frustrated, there's your chance :) I even had to way two complete days (!) to resolve a 24/7/365 type support call ! Pathetic, really. Not to say that the hardware is good, far from that. Place equivalent IBM, Dell, HP and Sun machines next to one another and you quickly see that Dell uses sub-quality parts. There is less precise documentation printed directly on the machine (a technique IBM and Sun have mastered). You often need two or three different screwdrivers to take the various pieces apart. While with the other Tier-1 vendors, most pieces don't even require any tool at all. Finally, the Documentation that is shipped with the Dell machines is of dubious quality compared with the other top vendors. So, to sum up, I strongly recommend going with either IBM or HP for FreeBSD systems. With them, you get quality hardware and real support. Of course it might be a bit more expensive. But it's worth it. Well, you get what you pay for don't you? YMMV of course. Cheers, David -- David Robillard UNIX systems administrator Oracle DBA CISSP, RHCE Sun Certified Security Administrator Montreal: +1 514 966 0122 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Opinions Wanted] Dell PowerEdge 2950 Servers ...
On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 09:41:19AM -0500, David Robillard wrote: My personal experience with Dell is that it's ok until you hit a problem. Then it's hell. So bad, in fact, that we don't purchase them anymore and have gone with IBM and HP systems for our FreeBSD, RedHat and Windows machines. Can you say PERC? IMHO, the problem with Dell is not their hardware, but their support (or lack of it). Ditto -- We had a (duh) PERC 3/di go south on a PE2550 and getting Dell to fix it was like pulling teeth. Once I finally leaned on them enough to get them to agree to an RMA, I had to wait until the next day for the part to be courried to my datacenter (which was a slight gaff, since they don't usually do SR), and another couple of hours for the guy to show up. If you plan on running your Business on Dell, be prepared for Incredibly bad and horrible support. Be it consumer product support or Enterprise 24/7/365 type support. Agreed.. and since FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE runs on Sun X86-64 servers (X2100, X4100, X4200), I don't see any reason to have to bother with it. However, I do have a handful of PE2950s in deployment, just upgraded them all to 6.2-RELEASE, no problems yet (unlike those crappy SuperMicro Pentium D boards). Cheers, ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Opinions Wanted] Dell PowerEdge 2950 Servers ...
In the last episode (Jan 26), chris neill said: On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 09:41:19AM -0500, David Robillard wrote: IMHO, the problem with Dell is not their hardware, but their support (or lack of it). Ditto -- We had a (duh) PERC 3/di go south on a PE2550 and getting Dell to fix it was like pulling teeth. Once I finally leaned on them enough to get them to agree to an RMA, I had to wait until the next day for the part to be courried to my datacenter (which was a slight gaff, since they don't usually do SR), and another couple of hours for the guy to show up. Maybe it depends on you you end up talking to. We recently had a PERC 4e/Di go bad in one of our PE2800s. Dell sent us a new motherboard same day and we replaced it ourselves in 2 hours (took so long only because we had never done it before). It did ship with an out-of-date BIOS, though, so it took a while to flash everything up. -- Dan Nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Opinions Wanted] Dell PowerEdge 2950 Servers ...
On Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 11:46:02PM -0400, Marc G. Fournier wrote: Have a friend that swears by them, but ... he's in the Linux camp, so tends to have a quasi-inside track ... What are ppls opinions on them as far as FreeBSD is concerned? Also, interested in what sort of specs ppl are running ... I'm interested in going with an 8xSAS drive system, dual-dual-core, figuring 10 or 16G of RAM ... redundant power and the Dell Remote Access Card ... We have had no problems with them, though I don't think we have had any decked out quite that heavy. jerry Thanks ... - Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org) Email . [EMAIL PROTECTED] MSN . [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo . yscrappy Skype: hub.orgICQ . 7615664 -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (FreeBSD) ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Opinions Wanted] Dell PowerEdge 2950 Servers ...
On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 08:59:43AM -0500, Bill Moran wrote: In response to Marc G. Fournier [EMAIL PROTECTED]: ... Some excised We have 4 1950s and 3 2950s in use around here. Only one is actually in production so far, the rest are still being configured, etc. We're mostly happy with them. The following is a list of caveats: *) The version 5 DRAC is nicer than the version 4, _except_ that you have to use a Windows client to connect to it. May not be an issue for you, but all our admins here use FreeBSD on their workstations :( Have you tried 'rdesktop' in the portst at /usr/ports/net/rdesktop or /usr/ports/net/xrdesktop? I don't know if it would apply to this, but it works for me in some other situations or similar MS annoyance. jerry ... much excised -- Bill Moran Collaborative Fusion Inc. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Opinions Wanted] Dell PowerEdge 2950 Servers ...
In response to Jerry McAllister [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 08:59:43AM -0500, Bill Moran wrote: In response to Marc G. Fournier [EMAIL PROTECTED]: ... Some excised We have 4 1950s and 3 2950s in use around here. Only one is actually in production so far, the rest are still being configured, etc. We're mostly happy with them. The following is a list of caveats: *) The version 5 DRAC is nicer than the version 4, _except_ that you have to use a Windows client to connect to it. May not be an issue for you, but all our admins here use FreeBSD on their workstations :( Have you tried 'rdesktop' in the portst at /usr/ports/net/rdesktop or /usr/ports/net/xrdesktop? I don't know if it would apply to this, but it works for me in some other situations or similar MS annoyance. The Dell DRAC is not based on the RDP protocol. It uses some kind of Dell-specific communication that seems to mimic VNC -- but standard VNC clients don't work with it. Version 4 DRAC provided a java client that worked fine on just about any OS we use, but the DRAC 5 requires some ActiveX component and doesn't run on non-MS systems. Luckily, there's qemu, but it's still not a perfect match. Qemu tends to be s l ow. -- Bill Moran Collaborative Fusion Inc. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Opinions Wanted] Dell PowerEdge 2950 Servers ...
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 - --On Friday, January 26, 2007 08:59:43 -0500 Bill Moran [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We have 4 1950s and 3 2950s in use around here. Only one is actually in production so far, the rest are still being configured, etc. We're mostly happy with them. The following is a list of caveats: *) The version 5 DRAC is nicer than the version 4, _except_ that you have to use a Windows client to connect to it. May not be an issue for you, but all our admins here use FreeBSD on their workstations :( I use FreeBSD for my 'get real work done' desktop, and Windows for games and the books ... so, having to run the DRAC client on it won't be an issue ... I do it now for the HPs since it gives me two screens to work with ... *) There's an issue where the systems will hang on reboot about 50% of the time. I tried to track this down but found that if I added any debugging code, the problem disappeared :( It's not a big deal for three reasons -- we don't reboot servers very often, the hang occurs after the disks are synced so it doesn't trigger an fsck, and we have DRAC cards in all of them :) 'k, so the hang is as its coming down, not coming up, right? If so, then that I can live with so same reasons as you ... will definitely have the DRAC cards ... *) The new PERC controllers use the mfi driver, which works well as far as we can tell ... unfortunately, there's no equivalent to megarc (which we use with 1850 and 2950 systems) so we have been unable to come up with a way to monitor the health of the RAID arrays from within the OS. With the HP server, 'camcontrol devlist' shows: COMPAQ RAID 1 VOLUME OK Nothing similar with the mfi driver? Also, are you using SAS or SATA on your 2950? *) Make sure you use a recent version of FreeBSD (6.2). The NIC cards on these use the bge driver, which was buggy as hell prior to 6.2. So I've heard, but I have bge on 3 of my HP servers, and never had a problem with them under 6.1 ... I'm sooo unlike everywhere else, guess I had to have some luck somewhere :) The biggest benefit we noticed when moving from the x850 to the x950 systems is that the IPMI and DRAC cards perform much better. It's a shame that Dell decided to use ActiveX for the v5 DRAC :( If its a solid machine, how often do you have to access the DRAC though? :) Can you post your 2950 configuration? Thanks ... - Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org) Email . [EMAIL PROTECTED] MSN . [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo . yscrappy Skype: hub.orgICQ . 7615664 -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (FreeBSD) iD8DBQFFukw54QvfyHIvDvMRAuAQAKDMQnZw/EZJhvxrgpQN+rt72F+bSwCg5mc5 WzGkEic/0BztCIFRFgz4HdE= =HfYS -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Opinions Wanted] Dell PowerEdge 2950 Servers ...
--On Friday, January 26, 2007 09:35:06 -0600 Dan Nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In the last episode (Jan 26), chris neill said: On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 09:41:19AM -0500, David Robillard wrote: IMHO, the problem with Dell is not their hardware, but their support (or lack of it). Ditto -- We had a (duh) PERC 3/di go south on a PE2550 and getting Dell to fix it was like pulling teeth. Once I finally leaned on them enough to get them to agree to an RMA, I had to wait until the next day for the part to be courried to my datacenter (which was a slight gaff, since they don't usually do SR), and another couple of hours for the guy to show up. Maybe it depends on you you end up talking to. We recently had a PERC 4e/Di go bad in one of our PE2800s. Dell sent us a new motherboard same day and we replaced it ourselves in 2 hours (took so long only because we had never done it before). It did ship with an out-of-date BIOS, though, so it took a while to flash everything up. It surely must. We have hundreds of Dell servers of every size, shape and description and have never had any trouble at all with support. We call, them the part that's bad, and they express it to us right then. We've even had parts hand-delivered from Austin by our rep. I think the key is to bypass 1st tier, which you can easily do by asking your rep for the 2nd tier #. We've found the Dell's to be extremely reliable (we just retired a six-year-old server because we were concerned that the drives might start failing), and we often sign up for additional support after the initial three-year warranty period has expired. I personally maintain a Dell (PowerEdge 500!) that is about five or six years old (don't recall exactly), and the only failure I've had a single drive. (I took the opportunity to upgrade to 5.4 at the time.) Paul Schmehl ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Senior Information Security Analyst The University of Texas at Dallas http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/security/
Re: [Opinions Wanted] Dell PowerEdge 2950 Servers ...
In response to Marc G. Fournier [EMAIL PROTECTED]: [snip] *) There's an issue where the systems will hang on reboot about 50% of the time. I tried to track this down but found that if I added any debugging code, the problem disappeared :( It's not a big deal for three reasons -- we don't reboot servers very often, the hang occurs after the disks are synced so it doesn't trigger an fsck, and we have DRAC cards in all of them :) 'k, so the hang is as it's coming down, not coming up, right? Correct. *) The new PERC controllers use the mfi driver, which works well as far as we can tell ... unfortunately, there's no equivalent to megarc (which we use with 1850 and 2950 systems) so we have been unable to come up with a way to monitor the health of the RAID arrays from within the OS. With the HP server, 'camcontrol devlist' shows: COMPAQ RAID 1 VOLUME OK Nothing similar with the mfi driver? Heh ...: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~]# camcontrol devlist -v scbus-1 on xpt0 bus 0: at scbus-1 target -1 lun -1 (xpt0) Figure that one out. Also, are you using SAS or SATA on your 2950? SAS. *) Make sure you use a recent version of FreeBSD (6.2). The NIC cards on these use the bge driver, which was buggy as hell prior to 6.2. So I've heard, but I have bge on 3 of my HP servers, and never had a problem with them under 6.1 ... I'm sooo unlike everywhere else, guess I had to have some luck somewhere :) The problem occurs with heavy use of UDP, so it's possible not to notice it if you're not doing NFS or doing NFS over tcp. When I tripped over it, I realized that the NFS was configured wrong :), but I wanted to get it fixed before we deployed anyway, just in case we started using heavy UDP. When the problem occurs, the adapter is unusable until a reboot, so it's pretty severe. The biggest benefit we noticed when moving from the x850 to the x950 systems is that the IPMI and DRAC cards perform much better. It's a shame that Dell decided to use ActiveX for the v5 DRAC :( If its a solid machine, how often do you have to access the DRAC though? :) Just often enough to be annoyed by it. Keep in mind that we're still deploying them, which means we're installing kernels and testing things and moving them around -- a lot of rebooting that is occurring less and less as they near actual deployment, but is pretty annoying at the time. Can you post your 2950 configuration? Kernel config? -- Bill Moran Collaborative Fusion Inc. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Opinions Wanted] Dell PowerEdge 2950 Servers ...
Marc G. Fournier wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Have a friend that swears by them, but ... he's in the Linux camp, so tends to have a quasi-inside track ... What are ppls opinions on them as far as FreeBSD is concerned? Also, interested in what sort of specs ppl are running ... I'm interested in going with an 8xSAS drive system, dual-dual-core, figuring 10 or 16G of RAM ... redundant power and the Dell Remote Access Card ... Thanks ... I will make a general comment about these servers. Dell servers really only rack nicely in Dell Racks. You *can* get them racked in other standard racks but it can be painful. Depending on how many you are purchasing you might want to factor in the Dell Rack cost. In general I would say the few PowerEdges we use have been rock solid in terms of hardware. Dell does put some effort in this department. Unfortunately I cannot comment on FreeBSD on these devices, we only have Linux (RedHat and now Gentoo) on the server. One day they will let me on the box :) Cheers, Jeff ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
