I'd like to know if anyone has experience with the Dell PowerEdge 1855 blade servers running on either FreeBSD_4 or FreeBSD_5. I'm looking to deploy several servers and I know that the 1850's will run just fine. I have concerns over the PERC4/im and the ethernet controllers on the 1855's. I assume since the 1855's have Intel Gig-E controllers they use the em driver, which I've had good luck with in the past. Apparently the 1855's integrated RAID uses the LSI (mpt) driver. I've heard mixed results on this with earlier versions of 4.x and 5.x, but nothing in the latest releases, 4.10+ and 5.3. Can anyone share their experiences with performance and stability on these machines? TIA -- Robert Blayzor, BOFH INOC, LLC rblayzor\@(inoc.net|gmail.com) PGP: http://www.inoc.net/~dev/ Key fingerprint = 1E02 DABE F989 BC03 3DF5 0E93 8D02 9D0B CB1A A7B0 If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0
On Wed, 16 Mar 2005, Robert Blayzor wrote:> I'd like to know if anyone has experience with the Dell PowerEdge 1855 > blade servers running on either FreeBSD_4 or FreeBSD_5. > > I'm looking to deploy several servers and I know that the 1850's will > run just fine. > > I have concerns over the PERC4/im and the ethernet controllers on the > 1855's. I assume since the 1855's have Intel Gig-E controllers they use > the em driver, which I've had good luck with in the past.Dell generally used Broadcom Ethernet chips, but the support is good for those as well.> Apparently the 1855's integrated RAID uses the LSI (mpt) driver. I've > heard mixed results on this with earlier versions of 4.x and 5.x, but > nothing in the latest releases, 4.10+ and 5.3. > > Can anyone share their experiences with performance and stability on > these machines?I haven't had problems with the mpt-based machine I have, but reportedly the driver doesn't handle certain error conditions. I believe a new driver or fixes are working their way thorugh the legalitites. I had problems with an IBM machine a while back and IM just Not Working, but I haven't tried it recently. -- Doug White | FreeBSD: The Power to Serve dwhite@gumbysoft.com | www.FreeBSD.org
Hi Robert, Robert Blayzor wrote:>I'd like to know if anyone has experience with the Dell PowerEdge 1855 >blade servers running on either FreeBSD_4 or FreeBSD_5. > >I've just installed 5.4-RC1 on one and am testing it now.>Apparently the 1855's integrated RAID uses the LSI (mpt) driver. I've >heard mixed results on this with earlier versions of 4.x and 5.x, but >nothing in the latest releases, 4.10+ and 5.3. > >Initial indications are that problems still exist. The problem seems to be that when configured as mirrored drives using hardware mirroring one of the drives isn't configured properly and runs at 8bit narrow speeds. My tests so far with bonnie and iozone certainly seem to back that up as both the test are showing abysmal results. The other big problem I had was actually doing the install. These blade servers have no internal cdrom drive and you have to use a USB connected CD drive. This works fine up to the point the kernel starts to boot and the system then hangs at the point where it is waiting for 15 seconds for SCSI devices. Unplugging the CD drive at this point will let it finish the boot however even after replugging in the drive and telling sysinstall to redo the device probe it still can't find the drive. I finally finished the install via ftp. I'm about to try breaking the mirror into jbod, redoing the install and seeing if that helps disk performance any although I would much prefer to use the hardware mirroring. More later... Carl.