Supported Raid Controller

[Rick Stevens]

Allen, Jack wrote:
>  
> -----Original Message-----
> *From:* Allen, Jack [mailto:Jack.Allen at McKesson.com]
> *Sent:* Monday, August 08, 2005 4:21 PM
> *To:* 'Redhat-install-list at redhat.com'
> *Subject:* Supported Raid Controller
> 
> Can anyone tell me or tell me where I can find out if the following Raid 
> Controller are directly supported by Red Hat AS version 4? That is I do 
> not have to go to the vendor to get a driver.
> 
> Serveraid 8I SAS
> Serveraid 6M
> 
> Other questions depending on the answer to the first question.
> 1) Can I do an initial load with these controllers? That is I do not 
> have to have some other drive to load on first and then put other file 
> systems on the drives controlled by these controllers.
> 
> 2) Any pros or cons about these controllers? Easy to configure, 
> performance as advertised, etc.
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> Jack Allen
> [Jack Allen] Well no one said anything or ask for more information. 
> 
>     After I unpacked the boxes, I found out both controller are made by 
> Adaptec. The system is an IBM xServer 366. The ServeRaid 8I plugs into a 
> special slot. The SAS disk drives are already cabled to a special I/O 
> card. The controller then controls the drives through that card. At boot 
> time you can access the setup for the 8i card. The system had 2 34G 
> drive and I set them up in Raid 1, mirrored pair. The ServeRaid 6M 
> allows you to look at the setup, but not create any disk arrays at boot 
> time. The system came with an Initial Setup CD. It clears all the disk, 
> sets the date and time, updates and sets up ServeRaid controllers and a 
> few other things. And guess how this is done. It runs Linux very much 
> like the Red Hat install does and leads you through each step. It even 
> updated the microcode on the 6M controller and ran the array setup. The 
> disk shelf had 12 36G drives with a split SCSI buss. So 6 of the disk 
> are accessed by channel 1 of the controller and the other 6 disk are 
> accessed by channel 2 of the controller. So I created 6 Raid 1, mirrored 
> pairs, 1 disk from each channel for each pair. When all this was done I 
> booted the Red Hat AS 4 CD and installed it.
> 
>     So the answer to my questions are, yes Red Hat AS 4 supports the 
> controller and yes they are fairly easy to configure. Performance seems 
> to be real good based on the limit amount of things I have done that use 
> the disk.

This is the first I've seen of your question.  I was going to answer,
but you seem to have already.  In the future, you may want to check the
Red Hat Hardware Catalog page at

	http://bugzilla.redhat.com/hwcert/

and search for your hardware.  It's not definitive (there's stuff that
works fine that isn't in the database), but it's a start.

>     Now I have other questions about Red Hat AS 4 that will follow shortly.

I can't wait!  :-D
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-        Hard work has a future payoff. Laziness pays off now.       -
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