RAID 5 starting off from 3 disks and OS Choice

[Roy_61]

Hello,

Could we start off from 3 RAID 5 disks on a DL 380 servers and hotplug new disks when necessary?

We use Debian but do you think such a manipulation is easier with Redhat (maybe Redhat supports the HP's hardware better?)?

Thank you,

Yvan

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hello Yvan,

you can create a RAID 5 with at least three disks and expand it with more disks as you need. But remember that you need to expand the partitions on that raid, too. The partitions will not grow with the RAID 5.

Regards,
Patrick

[Van den Broeck Tijl]

Actually RedHat doesn't really support HP, but HP compiles the drivers only for RedHat and SLES.

Personally I'd rather use different servers which do have hardware support from the open source community rather than proprietary HP drivers. I still don't understand why HP doesn't release it's drivers to Open Source and spares lots of wasted hours on readings specs & coding from the kernel driver developers.

I don't know for sure wheter that's the case or not with the DL380's RAID. But you shouldn't think that the Debian(vanilla kernel) drivers aren't as optimal as HP's own drivers. If there are Open Source drivers for it, they are mostly equally as good and even better.