failover( active/standby) raid controllers and failover (active/standby) NICs

[Brian Chow_1]

Can someone please direct me to documentation on how to configure failover RAID controllers and NIC cards? I need to do this on Proliant ML530 G2 and 380 servers. Thanks.

[Janine Bertolo]

Hello Brian;

Neither of those servers has an option to configure fail-over controllers.

They have hot-plug pci slots that allow you to hot-swap, hot-add and hot-remove a pci card.

Hope this helps,

Janine Bertolo

[Doug de Werd]

You can do NIC Teaming (also known as Network Fault Tolerance). Check this link for more info:

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/networking/teaming.html

Depending on the OS, you could force a dual disk controller configuration using OS mirroring at the disk LUN level, rather than at the HW level. You basically start off with 2 disk controllers, each conencted to a different set of disks. Then, when you select 2 LUNs to mirror (like in windows Disk Admin), you have to make sure that each of the LUNs are on a separate controller, and then by selecting mirroring for them, you have in fact made redundant controllers. This is sometimes called controller duplexing.

However, there are tradeoffs to this. All of the disk administration and management of the mirror sets is done manually through the OS utilities, and can sometimes get tricky (especially if you have a failure and have to recover). Hardware based RAID sets are much, much easier to manage.

Thanks,
Doug