Re: Proliant SATA
On Tuesday 28 June 2005 18:50, Marek Podmaka wrote:
> we are probably going to buy HP Proliant ML150 G2 SATA. Has anyone
> tried installing sarge on it? The main question is of course
> support for the SATA controller and NIC (Broadcom 5721 PCI-Express
> Gigabit). I can't find what type the SATA controller is, so I can't
> look if it's supported.
A customer of ours bought two HP low end "servers" on a very special
deal a few months ago. The HP's came with a hardware raid card,
hot-swap hardware, and a single SATA drive in a plug in hot-swop
module. This was after we had advised the client to buy a box with two
ide drives so that we could install Linux software Raid1.
When we started to setup the hardware we discovered:
- We needed a second drive in each box to build the raid1 array. The HP
price for a second SATA drive in a hot-swap module was VERY expensive
compared to the special deal price that they had paid for the initial
hardware. (Interesting marketing strategy, sell a box with hotswap
hardware and a singe drive at a bargin basement price, then make up
your profit when the customer is forced to buy your special hotswap
drives to populate his array ...)
- We probably could have supported the hardware raid, but it would have
meant downloading and/or compiling a special kernel, which would have
added to the customers costs and the hot swap capability was not
required. I never got as far as testing it. (I think there was a Red
Hat disk supplied with the machine).
- The NIC as I recall was a Broadcom gigabit device, and we found that
it was supported by late kernels (after we had managed to identify the
chipset and drivers required).
- Then we tried removing the hardware raid and hotswap cards, and
plugged the sata drives into the sata interface plugs provided on the
motherboard. However these were disabled in the HP bios and could not
be enabled. HP support advised us to upgrade the bios, that did not
help, then they advised us that the "on-board" ports were not supported
in that particular model.
Finally we bought IDE drives, and plugged them into the IDE interface on
the motherboard and installed software RAID1...
Not that these were not good quality machines, and could not do the
required job. Rather the swap capability was not required, and the
total price of the hot swap solution was way over budget.
This was a few months ago, I am sure that things have changed a bit by
now.
Regards
Ian
--
Ian Forbes ZSD
http://www.zsd.co.za
Office: +27 21 683-1388 Fax: +27 21 674-1106
Snail Mail: P. O. Box 46827, Glosderry, 7702, South Africa
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