Probably going to give this a shot in the near future anyway, but just wanted to check whether anyone has tried and had success putting either 3Ware 8006-2LP or 9550SX-4LP cards in Dell PowerEdge 860 systems with a couple of SATA drives instead of using the Dell PERC controllers?
View 3 RepliesMY server configure our drives with RAID-1.
How can I check it my server configure with 3ware or software raid ?
Also please advise me how can I monitor raid configuration that my raid is working fine or no ?
I have installed 3dm for checking 3ware 8086 card status, but when going to [url] it doesnt show anything. It seems cannot connect to 1080 port, even I have turned off the firewall. Have checked in its config file already to make sure the port is 1080
Is there anyone having experience with 3dm software?
Not sure if this is too specific for this forum or not, but since I've gotten great advice here in the past I'll give it a shot.
I have a colo'd production server with a 3ware 9500S-12 RAID card and 12 400GB drives attached. The drives form 3 arrays:
1) 2 drive RAID 1 (400GB)
2) 2 drive RAID 1 (400GB)
3) 6 drive RAID 5 (2TB)
plus 2 global hot spares.
For a variety of reasons I need to change this setup so that array 1) and 2) remain as is, and array 3) is removed and those 6 drives replaced with 6 new 750GB drives in JBOD mode. I've copied all the data from the RAID5 array number 3) onto 3 of the new 750 drives (the 2TB array wasn't completely full,) and I have 3 other blank 750GB drives.
What's the best / safest way to do this? Ideally I'd like to remove the 6 old 400GB drives and retain the ability to plug them all back in and get my old array back (if something goes horribly wrong doing the switch.)
Do I need to reboot into 3BM (3ware Bios Manager) to do this, or can I do it from the command line?
Is there any problem with having a drive that already contains data written to it by another system, and bringing it up on the 3ware card in JBOD mode with the data intact? (All filesystems are ext3.) I'm not going to have to reformat the drive, am I?
Is there any problem with the new drives being SATAII (Seagate Barracuda ES 750GB) but the old drives (and I think the 3ware card, and certainly my motherboard) being SATAI? I've read that this should "just work" but of course I am nervous! There are no jumpers I can see on the 750GB drives.
Will it be possible to remove the RAID 5 in such a way that I could plug the drives back in and get the array back?
we use 3Ware's 8006-2LP sata raid controller in each of our servers for RAID1. Our servers are all Supermicro boxes with hot-swap driver carriers (ie. the 2 raided drives are in them)
One of the drives appears to be starting to crap itself as smartd is reporting issues (although tw_cli c0 shows the raid to be OK) incl. multi zone errors.
Anyway, I'd like to replace the failing drive before it becomes a real issue so i've bought a replacement (74gb raptor, just like the original) drive.
Now I've never had to replace a failing drive in any of our servers before and I used to think it would be a simple matter of simply popping out the failing drive's carrier, put the new drive in the carrier and stick it back in the server... and the raid controller would do the rest.
Yes a little naive I know but i've never had to do it before so never paid much attention .. Anyway, I've just read and re-read the 3ware docs for my controller and their instructions are VERY VAGUE ... however I do get the feeling that the process is move involved ie. I need to tell the controller (via cli or 3dm) to first 'remove' the failing drive from the raid ..and then add a new drive and then rebuild
However there is one catch .. 3dmd/3dm2 has NEVER worked on our (centos 4) servers - 3dmd crashes regularly and 3dm2 never worked. So yes I am stuck with the 3ware cli ... which I don't mind as long as someone can tell me the sequency of commands I need to issue
As this point I'm thinking what I need to do via cli is
1) tell raid controlloer to remove the failing drive on port 0
2) eject the drive carrier with the drive in question
3) insert new drive in carrier and re-insert into server
4) using tw_cli tell the controller to add the new drive to the array and to rebuild the array
Am I anywhere close to being correct? I'm sure there are some of you out there who've done this countless times before with the 3ware controllers and hotswap drive carriers ..
I have a Dell 2850 with 6 HD's:
2x36 GB in a RAID 1 with LD 0 of 36GB (the HD's changed to 1x72 & 1x144 and is working fine)
3x72 GB in a RAID 5 with LD 1 of 144GB
1x72 GB as a HotSpare
The 'problem/chalange' is as follows:
The LD 0 RAID 1 is getting too small (2x36GB seen as 36) for my Windows 2008 server C drive. So I changed one 36 GB disk for a 72GB and after a couple of days the other 36 GB to a 144 GB disk (because I had those two and not 2x72 GB or 2x144 GB). Everything is working fine in this RAID 1. But now I want to enlarge/expand de Logical Drive (LD no. 0) from 36 GB to 72 GB.
I only managed to make an extra (third) Logical Drive (LD no. 2 of 36 GB).
Now I do not know how to delete this extra LD 2 on RAID 1 AND how to expand the RAID 1 LD 0 into a LD of 72 GB.
The problem is that I do not know which option to choose in the RAID controller panel (ctrl+m during the bootup progres screen).
Who knows which buttons to press or a Windows based program to configure the RAID?
I'm seeing the following from dmesg:
Quote:
3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: INFO (0x04:0x0053): Battery capacity test is overdue:.
When I'm in the CLI console (tw_cli) and tries to test the battery, I'm seeing the following:
Quote:
//vpsXX1> /c0/bbu test
Depending on the Storsave setting, performing the battery capacity test may
disable the write cache on the controller /c0 for up to 24 hours.
Do you want to continue ? Y|N [N]:
This is a live production server with client VPSs on it. Anyone here actually did 3ware battery test before on production system? Is it ok to do this? I'm seeking someone actually performed test operation before, not from someone just assumes it will be ok.
I have a 3ware 9650SE-24M8 RAID Controller. It was working fine for a few days and today while I was changing the RAID configs and installing different OSs, it just stopped working. Now when I boot my machine up it does not even detect any hard drives or RAID controller. I looked inside the box and the LED light on the RAID controller that is usually solid green is now blinking red. I googled for solutions but all searches lead me to useless information such as blinking red lights on the server case.
View 12 Replies View RelatedAfter seeing a topic a week or go discussing RAID cards I decided to give a hardware raid card a go to see if the performance will increase in one of our boxes.
Just for the simplicity of the test, I have put them into a RAID0 formation for purely performance tests and no redundancy. I choose a 3ware RAID card and went for the 2 port 8006-2LP option rather than the 9600 (as they had the 8006-2lp and risers in stock and what I've always been told is that SATA1 and SATA2 is really a selling point rather than any performance increase but we will leave that argument there). Because we run mainly Windows systems, I have put on Windows Server 2003 x64 R2. What I am finding after installing it all is it seems pretty "slow".
The rest of the hardware is a Dual, Quad Xeon (E5410x2), 8GB ram on a Tyan motherboard. Hard drives are 160GB Western Digital 7200 RPM so I can't see quite why it feels like its not running at a peak level.
Does anyone have any applications or software to give this RAID array a test as I really don't want to order any more or roll them out on to the network to find that software raid would be a better improvement. I did try a burn in app which tests everything but it according to the 20 seconds I ran it, in average it only transferred at 2mbs.. That cant be right..
I think one possibility is the RAID drivers arn't installed correctly as its still coming "Unknown Devices" in Device Manager and it seems It wont let me manually install the drivers for the 3ware device as it doesn't like the OS even though I have the correct ones and it installed Windows with it fine (a bit longer than normal anyway)
i want to use q9550 with 8G RAM,
install on X7SBL-LN2,
and use for 500G SATAII to do raid 10,
about Adaptec 2405SAS and 3Ware 9650SE-4LPML,
which one will get better performance?
There is a big difference in price between these two servers. I suspect the 1950 might be overkill.
My 15 websites are presently on a dedicated Celeron win 2003 server. Would the SC1435 make much difference in speed and tasking?
I presently am using an MS SQL DB hosted on a shared server. Is there any problem in putting the SQL DB on the same server as the sites are on? Is this a good or bad idea? Should the DB go on its own separate disk if on same server?
Quote:
Today we are going to conduct a detailed study of RAIDability of contemporary 400GB hard drives on a new level. We will take two "professional" drives from Seagate and Western Digital and four ordinary "desktop" drives for our investigation. The detailed performance analysis and some useful hints on building RAID arrays are in our new detailed article.
[url]
Just a general question really - I have been looking at getting a VPS hosting server in to a local datacentre.
What is the general way of doing this - is the best way to buy a server and then install everything thats needed (Virtualisation software) and then colo or are there datacentres that will set this up for me?
I will be using VMWare ESXi if that makes a difference so all I want to know is colo and install ESXi myself or see if I can find a dedi provider that will stick the DVD in the
drive and install ESXi for me?
Now that I have learnt what I guess is enough to build a web site (including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and Photoshop), I need to know what are the steps to put a web site online. I need to know everything:
1- Purchasing a domain and what are the different possibilities.
2- All about Web Servers (Buying - Renting - different operating systems and platforms)
3- Mail Servers and other services.
4- Security issues that I need to worry about.
5- Any other things I need to consider.
Where/what is the best DC is for putting a TrixBox Server (VOIP)?
View 5 Replies View RelatedIt seems like my e-mails to my clients are being redirected by GMAIL's spam filter into their SPAM folder.
View 5 Replies View RelatedI'm thinking about purchasing a Dell PowerEdge 860 and use it as a web server. I need your guy's inputs on what you guys think of this server regarding the quality, performance, & price.
This server retails for about $420 + s/h.
Here are the specs:
PowerEdge 860 Intel® Celeron® Processor 430 at 1.8GHz, 512K Cache, 800MHz FSB
Operating System No Operating System
Memory 512MB DDR2, 667MHz, 1X512MB Single Ranked DIMMs
Riser Card Riser with 2 Slots: 1 PCI Express x8 slot and 1 PCI Express x4 slot
Primary Hard Drive 80GB 7.2K RPM Serial ATA 3Gbps 3.5-in Cabled Hard Drive
Primary Hard Drive Controller Onboard SATA Controller - No RAID
Network Adapter On-Board Dual Gigabit Network Adapter, No TOE
CD/DVD Drive No CD/DVD
Bezel Bezel
Documentation Electronic Documentation and OpenManage DVD Kit
Hard Drive Configuration Onboard SATA, 1 Drive connected to Onboard SATA Controller - No RAID
Rack Rail Options No Rails Included
Hardware Support Services 3Yr BASIC SUPPORT: 5x10 HW-Only, 5x10 NBD Onsite
Installation Support Services No Installation Assessment
Power Cords Power Cord, NEMA 5-15P to C13, 15 amp, wall plug, 10 feet / 3 meter
I know this is a newbie question but with the specs above on the server, will this server be working right out of the box (equipped with PSU & other neccessary equips.) and ready for installtion of linux servers?
Long story short, my father owns a commercial/industrial distribution company where I work as a broker between contractors and manufacturers.
Our current IT Department (who has no formal computer training) has become more useless to me over the past year and are turning my computer into a counterproductive experience which has about driven me off the deep end.
I am therefore deciding to do the unthinkable and break off of the companies server and start working through one of my own here at home.
Ill basically need the machine to act as a place that recieves and stores emails then distributes out to my machines (laptop, desktop)whatever is connected to it, store and access job files/information, and I would like to be able to hook up to my server at work to access a particular program they use on their server, i guess I could probably just install the program on my server too.
I would also like it for personal use and storage as well as possibly hosting my own website (personal website).
I am looking to get a Dell Poweredge 1950 with some solid specs (spend about 4500) to get me going and will be taking classes at the local CC to educate me on running this thing.
I have a few questions about servers in general.
1. Is it possible for me to connect to the current server at my company to exchange or access files/ programs?
2. Can I do this without compromising the security of the server at work? (security is their #1 argument against everything, they told me once that mozilla on my machine compromised the security of the system - BS)
3. Can I run Apples for my workstation and laptop and still interface with the VMware software?
4. I am currently on FIOS here at home, will I need a new dedicated internet line to run the server? what do I need for speed!??
Thanks guys!
I am still totally new to this whole server scene so I apologize if some of my questions are completely insignificant. I am trying to read around as much as possible but I want to get started on this so i thought i would try and get some direction.
i notice the Dell do not configure the on board SATA to any RAID unless you purchase add on RAID adapter.
does this mean you can't configure it yourself? do dell poweredge onboard SATA controller support any RAID at all? do dell allow you to configure it yourself or you must purchase the add on RAID adapter?
Is Motherboard RAID as good as a dedicated PCI-E card? I am guessing a dedicated card is the best option, though costs more.
We are looking at buying a barebones server from Supermicro. It features an onboard RAID controller which supports RAID 0, 1, 5 & 10 - but for some strange reason it will only support RAID 5 if you use Windows. Here is a link to the page detailing the RAID features.
[url]
We are going to be running Linux, CentOS 5.1, so we will only have the choice of RAID 0, 1 or 10. This isn't an issue, as having RAID 10 on 4x SAS (15k) drives will be fine for speed and stability. What is an issue is would this RAID controller be as fast or reliable compared to a dedicated PCI-E card? If it can only use RAID 5 in windows, does that suggest this controller is too reliant on software? It would be a nightmare to suffer downtime and data loss because the controller couldn't hack it during a drive failure, or one day it decided to bugger up the array when rebooting.
So that leads me to looking at this card, this looks very good for what we need. Are adaptec a reliable brand? I've seen it advertised for £200, which is a good price.
[url]
This card features RAID 5 and 6, would RAID 6 be better than RAID 10 for redundancy, or is it too slow to bother with? Also it seems to have a battery module available for it, what does this achieve? Cos surely if the power dies the hard drives and motherboard can't run off this little battery, or does it just help the controller stay alive long enough with some hard drive information in its memory if the power goes out during a rebuild?
what is the difference in the PE 1950 III vs the original 1950? We're trying to get a couple in house but 1st must get a better price than $2,475 for the following specs below.
If anyone has a good sales rep at Dell (ours no longer works there), please send it via PM.
Dell PowerEdge 1950 III Specs:
2xQuad Core Xeon E5410 2.33 GHz Processors
4x1GB Ram
PERC6i RAID Controller
2x500GB 7.2k SATA 3Gbps HDs
CD-Rom/DVD
3yrs Support (5x10 HW, 5x10 NBD)
Price: $2,475.00
Who has linux on a dell poweredge 2650. i have debian on mine right now but havent been able to get the raid and embedded management and MIB's support working with linux
considering switching to redhat so i can use the packaged software from dell.
any one have any advise or experience getting the embedded hardware working with debian? if so how did you do it.
i want to be able to monitor the raid and the drives for defunt drives and such, and also be able to get into the embedded management card, and to be able to use mrtg with the MIB's for fan speed, cpu temp etc etc
Just picked up some used Dell PE 1750's, and was planning to add Drac's in them, but I can't seem to find which drac to use. Anyone that has any experience with this model?
Talked with a salesperson at Dell, first he didn't seem to know what Drac was, and after a while he came back to me with Drac IV which fits into PE1850. He belived it also should fit into 1750, but I don't belive that.
I could try the Software-RAID 5 of the EQ9 Server of Hetzner.
Does anyone here has experiences, how fast a hardware raid 5 compared against the software-Raid 5 is?
The i7-975 should have enough power to compute the redundnacy on the fly, so there would be a minimal impact on performance. But I have no idea.
I want to run the server under ubuntu 8.04 LTS x64.
On it a vitualisation like VMware the IO-Load could get really high.
So I've just got a server with 2xSATA raid 1 (OS, cpanel and everything in here) and 4xSCSI raid 10 (clean).
Which one do you guys think will give the best performance:
1. Move mysql only to 4xSCSI raid 10
2. Move mysql and home folder to 4xSCSI raid 10
I am in a somewhat complicated situation... I wanted to order a custom server with hardware 3Ware RAID controller but after over a month of waiting I was told the HW RAID controller, as well as any other 3Ware controller they tried, does not work with the motherboard used in the server from Fujitsu-Siemens and that they simply got a reply from FS that the controller is not certified to work with their motherboard.
So although I'd prefer a HW raid, I am forced to either choose a different webhost or setup a software RAID. The problem is, I haven't done that before and am somewhat moderately...scared
I have read a lot of the info about SW RAID on Linux that I could find through Google but there are some questions unanswered still. So I thought that perhaps some of the more knowledgeable WHT members could help me with this problem...
The server specs will be:
Core2Duo E6600 (2.4Ghz), 2GB RAM, 6-8x* 250GB SATA II HDDs, CentOS 4.4 or SuSe, DirectAdmin
* I prefer 8 HDDs (or actually 9) over 6 but I am not sure if their server chassis can hold that many HDDs, I am awaiting answer from them. They don't have any other drives beside the 250GB ones so I am limited to those.
The preferred SW RAID setup is to have everything in RAID 10, except for the /boot partition which has to be on RAID-1 or no RAID I believe, plus one drive as hot spare (that would be the 9th drive). I am quite sure they will not do the setup for me but will give me access to KVM over IP and a Linux image preinstalled on the first HDD so that I'll have a functional system that needs to be upgraded to RAID-10.
How do I do that? The big problem I see is that LILO or GRUB can't boot from a software RAID-5/10 so I will have to mount the /boot partition elsewhere. It's probably terribly simple...if you have done it before which I have not. I have read some articles on how to setup a RAID-5/10 with mdadm (e.g. [url] ) but they usually do not talk about how to setup the boot partition. Should it be setup as a small sized (100-200MB) RAID-1 partition spread over all of the drives in the otherwise RAID-10 array?
What about swap? Should I create a 4-8GB (I plan to upgrade the server RAM to 4GB in near future) RAID-1 swap partition on each of the disks or swap to a file on the main RAID-10 partitions. The second sounds simpler but what about performance? Is swapping to a file on RAID-10 array a bad idea, performance wise?
Is it possible to grow a RAID-10 array in a way similar to growing a RAID-5 array with mdadm (using two extra drives instead of one of course)? mdadm doesn't actually even mention RAID-10 despite it does support it without having to create RAID-0 on top of RAID-1 pairs if the support is in kernel, from what I know.
Of the three raid card brands, which do you think is best and why?
I'm currently looking for a card that can do both SAS and SATA, and have four internal ports.
When trying to load an ovzkernel it loses support for the 3ware 8006 controller. As suggested on ovzforums, it says to load the new 3dm2 tools. I tried this but when I try to install it, it says it can't find the 3dm2 binary.
View 0 Replies View RelatedI have a Dell Poweredge 2650
Specs:
Dual Xeon 2.4 GHz 400 MHz FSB
ServerWorks GC-LE Chipset supports five PCI buses: three PCI-X (1 x 64bit/133MHz,
2 x 64bit/100MHz), one 64bit/66MHz, one legacy bus (32bit/33MHz)
12 GB DDR PC 2700 ECC Registered
(X5) Maxtor Atlas 15k II 3.5 series Ultra320 SCA II 80 pin in RAID 5
PERC 3/DI RAID controller with 128MB or Cache with back-up battery
(X2) integrated Broadcom Gigabit BaseT with load balancing and failover support
INTEL PRO/1000 MF GIGABIT SERVER ADAPTER C2126 FIBER
J1679 DELL INTEL PRO1000MT DUAL CARD PCI-X
Dual 500 watt power-supplies
I have a few questions.
1) How many websites could a server like this handle on a 100 Mbps synchronous line?
2) Are there any colocation companies that would hook up to the fiber card for connection?
3) What is the best choice of action when dropping line to in in a colocation center? The dual on-board or the Dual Intel Pro/1000MT? I know that there is load balancing on the on-board Broadcom NICs but how do you use them for load balancing mode?? Then are seen as two separate NICs. I can drop as many lines as needed in the data center I am planing going into so number of lines is not an issue. let me know the best action on connectivity for my server with my specs provided.
We have a rack with a bunch of Dell servers in them. The distance between the front vertical mounting brackets and the rear vertical mounting brackets is just over 28 inches (715 mm). We've always used Dell static rails they and they have always fitted perfectly.
We have recently received some new Poweredge 2970s with Rapid / Versa rails, and it seems that the front and rear mounting brackets are only 24 inches (609 mm) apart.
Am I missing something? I can't find any way of adjusting the length of the Rapid / Versa rails.
It looks like we are going to have to pull all the gear out of the rack, move the rear mounting brackets forward, and put everything back in. This is a real nuisance (and I would do pretty much anything to avoid it).
I got a Dell PowerEdge 850 a couple of years ago, with a 2.8Ghz P4D processor and 2GB RAM. It's currently on CentOS 4 and running quite well with H-Sphere. I host on it a couple of sites coded in PHP, and sometimes a game server or two.
I'm currently thinking of moving on to Windows Server 2008 as I'm intending to put up a web app using ASP.Net. As you can see, my system isn't really a beefy machine, and I was wondering if I would be able to run the new OS on it and continue to be able to achieve a satisfactory performance?