Since i've been hit with some financial hard times, I'm finding myself having to sell a machine I HONESTLY don't want to get rid of, but i'm running out of options.
Here's the specs
Dell Poweredge 6400 Dual XEON 550Mhz 1GB DDR RAM 8 18GB SCSI Drives (Currently RAID'd to 100GB) CD-ROM Floppy drive Onboard Video, NIC
I can install the two NIC's i took out some time ago for anyone. Currently It will only load Gentoo, FreeBSD or Debian (RedHat and others have a problem with the PERC/2 RAID card inside).
starting offer is $250.. if anyone wants this, lemme know. Also if you have questions, please let me know and I'll do my best to answer them.
Joe Brouhard jbrouhard@chansata.com
FYI -
Newer version of Redhat or Fedora will load fine on a machine with the PERC/2 controller. Older versions will load to, but you will have to potentially pass boot arguments. You can find more information at http://linux.dell.com.
Remember - Linux is Linux. m'kay?
On Sun, 4 Jun 2006, Joe Brouhard wrote:
Since i've been hit with some financial hard times, I'm finding myself having to sell a machine I HONESTLY don't want to get rid of, but i'm running out of options.
Here's the specs
Dell Poweredge 6400 Dual XEON 550Mhz 1GB DDR RAM 8 18GB SCSI Drives (Currently RAID'd to 100GB) CD-ROM Floppy drive Onboard Video, NIC
I can install the two NIC's i took out some time ago for anyone. Currently It will only load Gentoo, FreeBSD or Debian (RedHat and others have a problem with the PERC/2 RAID card inside).
starting offer is $250.. if anyone wants this, lemme know. Also if you have questions, please let me know and I'll do my best to answer them.
Joe Brouhard jbrouhard@chansata.com
Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
So anyway... what's the pros/cons of the various RAID configurations possible with 8 of 18 GB HDs? ;) Any reason to use RAID 5+0 over just RAID 5? At first glance, while 5+0 allows loss of two disks, that only appears to be the case if both disks are in a separate set of 4. If there's two disks failing, wouldn't that be a 50:50 chance on 5+0 being ok, or being dead? Is it worth the 18 GB to get that 50:50 chance?
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Luke-Jr wrote:
So anyway... what's the pros/cons of the various RAID configurations possible with 8 of 18 GB HDs? ;) Any reason to use RAID 5+0 over just RAID 5? At first glance, while 5+0 allows loss of two disks, that only appears to be the case if both disks are in a separate set of 4. If there's two disks failing, wouldn't that be a 50:50 chance on 5+0 being ok, or being dead? Is it worth the 18 GB to get that 50:50 chance?
If you're thinking about RAID 5+0 (presumably dual 4-disk RAID 5 sets), just run one RAID5 array with 7 disks, and leave the eighth as a hot-spare. You can still sort-of loose two disks (as long as they don't both go within a RAID rebuild time of each other...much better odds than your 5+0), and you get an extra 18 Gig of drive space.
If you're a bit more nervous about your drives, you could always go with a RAID 10 setup (dual 4-disk RAID0 stripes, mirrored together). You could loose up to 4 disks that way, but it wastes a lot of space.
I'd personally go with a 6 or 7 disk RAID5 and leave 1 or 2 disks as hot spares.
NOTE: There can be performance issues when doing RAID5, but with 18G drives, I suspect the limit on system performance will be your disks (even with 8 of them), rather than calculating parity...might not hurt to run some tests, however.
- -- Charles Steinkuehler charles@steinkuehler.net
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Charles Steinkuehler wrote:
Luke-Jr wrote:
So anyway... what's the pros/cons of the various RAID configurations possible with 8 of 18 GB HDs? ;) Any reason to use RAID 5+0 over just RAID 5? At first glance, while 5+0 allows loss of two disks, that only appears to be the case if both disks are in a separate set of 4. If there's two disks failing, wouldn't that be a 50:50 chance on 5+0 being ok, or being dead? Is it worth the 18 GB to get that 50:50 chance?
If you're thinking about RAID 5+0 (presumably dual 4-disk RAID 5 sets), just run one RAID5 array with 7 disks, and leave the eighth as a hot-spare. You can still sort-of loose two disks (as long as they don't both go within a RAID rebuild time of each other...much better odds than your 5+0),
and you get an extra 18 Gig of drive space.
Umm...I must not be good at math in my head today...
Both options would loose the capacity of two disks, so there's no capacity benefit to either approach. The difference is only in the fault tolerance when loosing two disks (IMHO, the 7-disk RAID5 with a hot-spare is better than running RAID 5+0).
- -- Charles Steinkuehler charles@steinkuehler.net
Any ideas on how to actually configure the RAID? :/ It's a PERC2/DC aka MegaRAID 467. Dell's utility thing just sees 6 of the 8 disks...
On Sat, 2006-06-17 at 19:13 +0000, Luke-Jr wrote:
Any ideas on how to actually configure the RAID? :/ It's a PERC2/DC aka MegaRAID 467. Dell's utility thing just sees 6 of the 8 disks...
Stupid question: is the SCSI cable terminated properly? If so, have you looked at the LSI MegaRAID 2 User Guide? In there, there's supposed to be a list of what the hardware limitations are ... I tried looking for you but the file is password protected when gotten from LSI's web site.
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Luke-Jr wrote:
Any ideas on how to actually configure the RAID? :/ It's a PERC2/DC aka MegaRAID 467. Dell's utility thing just sees 6 of the 8 disks...
I've only worked with the Dell PERC stuff a little bit, and I used the BIOS utility, which saw all the disks I had connected (although it was only 5 or 6...definitely not 8).
Is "Dell's utility thing" the BIOS RAID configuration setup, or something else? If the BIOS utility doesn't see all the disks, you've probably got something really basic wrong (ie: loose cable, bad HDD, etc).
- -- Charles Steinkuehler charles@steinkuehler.net
On Saturday 17 June 2006 19:50, you wrote:
Is "Dell's utility thing" the BIOS RAID configuration setup, or something else?
A proprietary "Dellmgr" program they have on their website.
If the BIOS utility doesn't see all the disks, you've probably got something really basic wrong (ie: loose cable, bad HDD, etc).
I haven't actually looked in the BIOS, as that means rewiring my keyboard and monitor, and isn't that adequate a solution for most people who would be using RAID (as BIOS defeats the point of hot-swapping stuff)
When I configured the RAID on that server you, got, I used the Adaptec On-board BIOS Manager. Works better IMHO over anything Dell has.
Luke-Jr wrote:
On Saturday 17 June 2006 19:50, you wrote:
Is "Dell's utility thing" the BIOS RAID configuration setup, or something else?
A proprietary "Dellmgr" program they have on their website.
If the BIOS utility doesn't see all the disks, you've probably got something really basic wrong (ie: loose cable, bad HDD, etc).
I haven't actually looked in the BIOS, as that means rewiring my keyboard and monitor, and isn't that adequate a solution for most people who would be using RAID (as BIOS defeats the point of hot-swapping stuff) _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
On Sat, 2006-06-17 at 20:05 -0500, Joe Brouhard wrote:
When I configured the RAID on that server you, got, I used the Adaptec On-board BIOS Manager. Works better IMHO over anything Dell has.
PERC is made by LSI. Typically, Dell servers come with an on-board Adaptec 2-channel, SCSI, non-RAID controller that is mostly useless.
He is dealing with the PERC, not the Adaptec.
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Luke-Jr wrote:
On Saturday 17 June 2006 19:50, you wrote:
Is "Dell's utility thing" the BIOS RAID configuration setup, or something else?
A proprietary "Dellmgr" program they have on their website.
If the BIOS utility doesn't see all the disks, you've probably got something really basic wrong (ie: loose cable, bad HDD, etc).
I haven't actually looked in the BIOS, as that means rewiring my keyboard and monitor, and isn't that adequate a solution for most people who would be using RAID (as BIOS defeats the point of hot-swapping stuff)
Um...OK. It would still make a decent data point for testing. I'm not real trusting of Dell's linux applications.
If you're running headless, have you re-directed the BIOS console to a serial port? You shouldn't need to have a KB/Monitor hooked up to access BIOS setup if it's a recent Dell server machine (ie: the ones that typically come with PERC hardware RAID controllers).
- -- Charles Steinkuehler charles@steinkuehler.net
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