Re: LSI Logic SCSI RAID Controller problems

[Brian Long <brilong cisco com>]

On Tue, 2005-10-25 at 06:43 -0500, Ed Wilts wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 07:44:30AM +0200, Evan Pierce wrote:
> > Alternatively what hardware RAID 5 controller cards would be recommended out
> > of the box for RHEL 4? 
> 
> I've got Compaq SmartArray cards in all of my Linux systems.  Most are
> mirroring these days but they work well and I've never had an issue.  I
> don't like HP's tools for monitoring them but they do work.  I normally
> mirror my system disks and for larger file stores, connect to our SAN.
> I cloned a couple of systems last weekend - simply shut the source
> server, rip out a drive, and boot.  When the system came up, I put in a
> spare drive and the SmartArray automatically rebuilt the mirror.
> Threw the source drive into a new server and it came up (complained only
> to tell me that there was only 1 member of the mirror set).  Reset the
> host-specific stuff, booted, then threw in a spare drive and watched
> this mirror set reconstruct itself.

I completely agree with Ed.  My team has used the same methodology to
clone systems using the HP/Compaq Proliant hardware.  For patching on
critical systems, we shutdown and pull one half of the OS hardware
mirror before starting the patching.  This way, if the OS patch is
botched or an application breaks, we can shutdown, switch the disks,
boot and then re-insert the botched drive which gets re-synced to the
pre-patched state.

We have over 1,300 HP Proliants running RHEL 3.  We're just starting to
work on RHEL 4, so no numbers specific to this list.  :)

/Brian/

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       Brian Long                      |         |           |
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