DL160 G6 with Smart Array P212 - RHEL 5.4 install question

[hppfl]

Hi,

I have a DL160 G6 with SmartArray P212.
2 x 250GB drives and 9 x 1TB drives.
All drives are non-hp. I'm trying to
setup RHEL 5.4 on it for use as a file server
for a render farm.

I'm looking for opinions from forum members on whether to use the hardware RAID or just configure each disk on a seperate LUN and use
linux software RAID.

I was thinking of putting:-

OS on the 2 x 250GB drives RAID 1 mirror
User data on the 9 x 1TB drives, RAID5 or 6 with a XFS file system.

I've been unable to find any info on whether the SmartArray P212 will perform better than
Linux software RAID. Also, the basic P212 does not allow RAID6.

I'm also concerned as to monitoring if I go
the hardware RAID route.
Does HP provide software to run under RHEL to alert the sysadmin if there are P212 RAID problems ?

Thank you

Pete

[Tim Nelson]

IMHO theory suggests that offloadding the raid management to the P212 controller reduces the overhead in the OS.

I believe that the HP Health and SIM agents will monitor the P212 and report either via messages or snmp traps.. I have yet to have an error nor have I found the exact piece of documentation that proves this comment.

There is also a cli for the management of the controller which also gives status.

all utils can be found here.
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodNameId=3885792&prodTypeId=329290&prodSeriesId=3885791&swLang=13&taskId=135&swEnvOID=4004

[Tim Nelson]

Here is some more info on the Proliant Service Pack ( PSP ).

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00223285/c00223285.pdf

[Michal Kapalka (mikap)]

hi,

i would recomend you to use a HW raid instead of Linux SW RAID, and the HO hase the PSP, for the servers, but we are using snmp + nagios.

mikap

[Michal Kapalka (mikap)]

hi,

check in the attacment of this message :

Key Features ==>


Addition of the battery backed cache upgrade enables Capacity Expansion, RAID migration,
and Stripe Size Migration. Additionally, Smart Array Advanced Pack license key enables
RAID 6 (ADG), 6+0, Advanced Capacity Expansion, Mirror Splitting and Recombining in Offline Mode, Drive Erase, Performance Optimization-Degraded Reads and Read Coalescing (VOD)


mikap

[Michal Kapalka (mikap)]

hi,

sorry, i forgot to add the attachment.

mikap

[hppfl]

Thanks for all replies so far. In fact I meant to type DL180 not DL160. Apologies for this. Does this affect any opinions stated ?

[Michal Kapalka (mikap)]

hi,

dl180g6 is 2U server but the situation is the same as on dl160.

mikap