Correct drivers

[Samer Bouez]

Hello. We are using HP BL460c G6 blade servers (PN: 507864-B21) connected via 3G SAS switches (PN: AJ865A) to a MSA 2312sa G2 (PN: AJ805A), the servers are hosting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (x86 64-bit), but the drivers we are using do not seem to be fully compatible with the MSA.

There are two different smart array driver architectures (and implementations):

• ·  cciss (http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/online/pages/man4/cciss.4.html) 
• ·  hpsa (http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/online/pages/man4/hpsa.4.html)

But none of them has the controller MSA2312sa G2 listed as supported. We also didn't manage to find any other driver implementations. So, it seems, that we have to stick with one of mentioned drivers.

The question is: which one we have to choose & which specific version (for ex: cciss 3.6.* or 4.6.*) ?

[Ivan Lyanguzov]

Hi,

Hpsa driver is only available in kernel 2.6.33-rc1 and above, while RHEL 5 uses kernel 2.6.18, which only contains cciss.

Cciss driver supports HP Smart Array controller installed in blade, not the storage array. To check whether your Smart Array, SAS switch and storage array are all compatible and supported, use Single Point of Connectivity Knowledge (SPOCK):
http://www.hp.com/storage/spock

It is always better to use drivers from distribution, unless there is specific need to use driver from ProLiant Support Pack or from HP downloads (such as support asked you to do so, or driver from HP downloads contains feature, which was not yet put upstream at the time Linux distribution was released).

Ivan.