Re: Blade server recommendations?
Hi there,
On Fri, May 13, 2005 at 12:50:55PM +0200, James Flinton wrote:
> I have read that HP support Woody on their servers, although this
> article was dated 2002.
Well - HP certainly does NOT support Debian officially on their (blade)
servers. I've had a brief conversation at Linuxworld, and then an e-mail
exchange with Andy Brown at HP about this.
In my experience, most of the hardware is supported no problem (if you build
a custom kernel). My issue with HP is their tendency for binary RPM-only
software for monitoring the hardware. It's kind of important to see which
drives are going to die in your raid array, and HP is not exactly forthcoming
with the necessary software that also runs on Debian.
Some of their RPMs can be converted with alien and then actually work; others
do not (like the ones that build and install a kernel module for reading out
the values from the hardware, sigh).
I've suggested that if HP wanted more non-red hat only customers, they'd best
get all that extra kernel code for monitoring into the official Linux kernel
- like they do with the actual drivers for their raid cards etc. But that was
where my conversation with Andy at HP stopped, I haven't heard from him
again.
All of this applies to the BL-20 blades, as well as the DL-380 servers, and
probably more of them.
Bye for now,
Ward.
> I have also read that Intel/IBM are pushing their "open" blade
> architecure, and seem to be winning.
>
> My primary concerns are:
> 1. Will it run Debian 3.1?
> 2. Heartbeat - no serial cables.
> 3. HP, IBM/Intel or someone else?
>
> Should a blade act like any other machine, and work out of the box, or
> are there any particular things to watch out for? We don't want to use
> binary drivers, thery're too much trouble.
>
> As for heartbeat, we prefer to use serial connections for heartbeat,
> rather than tcp/ip, but we have not seen any blades with serial
> connections - do they even exist?
>
> Any recommendations, on or off list would be welcomed.
>
> Regards,
> James Flinton
>
>
>
> !DSPAM:428486a851106498063710!
>
Ward Vandewege.
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