RHEL 6 support for Proliant DL585 and DL585 G2

[martin_g_1]

Hi all,

our servers (Proliant DL585 and DL585 G2) are running under RHEL4 but according to RH annoucements they will no longer support RHEL4.

Therefore our plan is to skip RHEL5 and move directly to RHEL6. But without the correct drivers it would be probably imposible...

For DL585 and DL585 G2 I can find only drivers for RHEL5 so far, but for example DL585 G7 there are drivers for RHEL 6.

Can you help me where I can find whether DL585 and DL585 G2 will be supported also for RHEL6? And if yes, then when I can expect the drivers to be available for download?

Thank you.

Martin

[Johan Guldmyr · Accepted solution]

Hey, see here:

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/linux/hplinuxcert.html

DL585 G2 and G1 is supported on RHEL 5 and below.

Do you have to have RHEL6 drivers? Won't the ones from 5 work on 6?

Also for RHEL6:

"HP has certified and will support these servers with the following caveats:

SAN Support Pending"

[martin_g_1]

Thank you for the link!
The support for RHEL6 for DL585 and DL585 G2 is not even planned :(

I have a bad experience with installing 'standard' software for older versions of RHEL in newer ones. Therefore I was not even thinking about doing it with the drivers...
Do you have some experience with using drivers for RHEL5 in RHEL6? Is it safe?

[Johan Guldmyr]

I do not have experience with RHEL5 drivers on RHEL6, maybe somebody else who sees this post does though.

Have you considered a virtual machine and have RHEL6 in there?

On the link above there is a link for VMWare. 4.1 is OK on DL585 G2.
G1 is not listed there and on VMWare's page ( http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php ) it is certified for up to 3.5 U5.

[martin_g_1]

We use the servers for scientific simulations. They require as much CPU and RAM performance as available. I am afraid that using virtual machine will significantly reduce the 'useable' performance...

Considering the situation with RHEL6 support I think we will move to RHEL5 'only'...

Thank you once again for the help!

[SMR]

The 585/G2's may not officially support RHEL6 but I don't see why they wouldn't. The drivers are and will be there for a while. The 585 I believe has a standard Broadcom Gb controller which uses the tg3 driver and the 585 G2 has a Broadcom Multifunction NIC which uses the bnx2 driver, the smart array controller uses the cciss. They won't be certified since neither HP nor RH have any interest in certifying old hardware... that said... I would stick to RHEL 5 if you're madly concerned about stability.

Cheers!

[martin_g_1]

SMR, when you are speaking about drivers (tg3, bnx2, cciss) you have in mind drivers in 'standard' distribution of RHEL6 or did you mean that drivers for newer servers for RHEL6 should be backward compatible?

[SMR]

Martin,

I mean the standard distro drivers but yes, drivers for newer servers should be backward compatible.