Hi all, I may be getting a new Dell PE1850 soon, to replace our ancient CVS server (still running 4-STABLE). The new machine will ideally run 6.0 and have a PERC4e/DC RAID card - the one with battery-backed cache. This is listed as supported by amr(4), but I'm wondering how well it actually works in the case of a disk failure. Will the driver tell me that disk has failed (a syslog message would be enough) or will I have to make a daily trip into the server room to check the front panel lights? Presumably it handles hot-swapping a replacement drive OK? I found some posts mentioning some management/monitoring tools for these controllers that were allegedly available from the www.lsilogic.com website, but I can't find anything on there for FreeBSD. Do the Linux tools work? Cheers, Scott -- ==========================================================================Scott Mitchell | PGP Key ID | "Eagles may soar, but weasels Cambridge, England | 0x54B171B9 | don't get sucked into jet engines" scott at fishballoon.org | 0xAA775B8B | -- Anon
On Thu, 5 Jan 2006, Scott Mitchell wrote:> Hi all, > > I may be getting a new Dell PE1850 soon, to replace our ancient CVS server > (still running 4-STABLE). The new machine will ideally run 6.0 and have a > PERC4e/DC RAID card - the one with battery-backed cache. This is listed as > supported by amr(4), but I'm wondering how well it actually works in the > case of a disk failure. Will the driver tell me that disk has failed (a > syslog message would be enough) or will I have to make a daily trip into > the server room to check the front panel lights? Presumably it handles > hot-swapping a replacement drive OK?>From what I remember, you will receive status-change kernel messages whendisks disappear, rebuilds start, and so forth. So for most day-to-day manipulation you should be fine. You may want to make sure the auto rebuild option is enabled in the controller's BIOS since no working control programs from userland are generally available at this time. That also means you can't create new volumes at runtime, but thats not so horrible... -- Doug White | FreeBSD: The Power to Serve dwhite@gumbysoft.com | www.FreeBSD.org
Scott Mitchell wrote:>Hi all, > >I may be getting a new Dell PE1850 soon, to replace our ancient CVS server >(still running 4-STABLE). The new machine will ideally run 6.0 and have a >PERC4e/DC RAID card - the one with battery-backed cache. This is listed as >supported by amr(4), but I'm wondering how well it actually works in the >case of a disk failure. Will the driver tell me that disk has failed (a >syslog message would be enough) or will I have to make a daily trip into >the server room to check the front panel lights? Presumably it handles >hot-swapping a replacement drive OK? > >I found some posts mentioning some management/monitoring tools for these >controllers that were allegedly available from the www.lsilogic.com >website, but I can't find anything on there for FreeBSD. Do the Linux >tools work? > >FYI there also has been a big update to the amr driver which claims to dramatically increase performance among other things, interestingly enought it was augmented by Yahoo, I can only assume they are moving to Dell, yahoo for me (and now you :). The updates are still in -current but it will be MFC'ed into stable sooner or later. http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-src/2005-December/056814.html Log: Mega update to the LSI MegaRAID driver: 1. Implement a large set of ioctl shims so that the Linux management apps from LSI will work. This includes infrastructure to support adding, deleting and rescanning arrays at runtime. This is based on work from Doug Ambrosko, heavily augmented by LSI and Yahoo. 2. Implement full 64-bit DMA support. Systems with more than 4GB of RAM can now operate without the cost of bounce buffers. Cards that cannot do 64-bit DMA will automatically revert to using bounce buffers. This option can be forced off by setting the 'hw.amr.force_sg32" tunable in the loader. It should only be turned off for debugging purposes. This work was sponsored by Yahoo. 3. Streamline the command delivery and interrupt handler paths after much discussion with Dell and LSI. The logic now closely matches the intended design, making it both more robust and much faster. Certain i/o failures under heavy load should be fixed with this. 4. Optimize the locking. In the interrupt handler, the card can be checked for completed commands without any locks held, due to the handler being implicitely serialized and there being no need to look at any shared data. Only grab the lock to return the command structure to the free pool. A small optimization can still be made to collect all of the completions together and then free them together under a single lock. Items 3 and 4 significantly increase the performance of the driver. On an LSI 320-2X card, transactions per second went from 13,000 to 31,000 in my testing with these changes. However, these changes are still fairly experimental and shouldn't be merged to 6.x until there is more testing. Thanks to Doug Ambrosko, LSI, Dell, and Yahoo for contributing towards this.
On Jan 5, 2006, at 5:41 PM, Scott Mitchell wrote:> I may be getting a new Dell PE1850 soon, to replace our ancient CVS > server > (still running 4-STABLE). The new machine will ideally run 6.0 and > have a > PERC4e/DC RAID card - the one with battery-backed cache. This is > listed asI have an 1850 with the buil-in PERC 4e/Si since all I needed was the RAID1 mirror of the internal drives. It works extremely well, and the speed is quite good. As for notices of when the drives go bad, under 4.x I've had disk failures with the amr driver (different PERC cards) and not gotten any such notices in the syslog that I recall. I did find a program posted to one of the freebsd lists called 'amrstat' that I run nightly. It produces this kind of output: Drive 0: 68.24 GB, RAID1 <writeback,no-read-ahead,no-adaptative- io> optimal If it says "degraded" it is time to fix a drive. You just fire up the lsi megaraid tools and find out which drive it is. If you go to the LSI download area, they have one file for FreeBSD, which is labeled the driver. In that zip file is also the management software for freebsd. You'll want that. Personally, I like the "MEGAMGR" software which was released for freebsd 4.x and mimics the BIOS' interface in a terminal window. The rebuild on LSI controllers is set to automatic on the dells as default. It just works as expected. Overall, I'm a big fan of the LSI cards and the amr driver... Unfortunately for me, the latest equipment I just got only takes low- profile cards, and LSI doesn't offer a dual channel RAID card in low- profile configuration... so I need to look at adaptec.
On Friday 13 January 2006 11:49 am, Doug Ambrisko wrote:> Jung-uk Kim writes: > [ Charset euc-kr unsupported, skipping... ]If your mail client cannot handle the charset, read: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200601122020.59843.jkim Jung-uk Kim
On Friday 13 January 2006 11:58 am, Jung-uk Kim wrote:> On Friday 13 January 2006 11:49 am, Doug Ambrisko wrote: > > Jung-uk Kim writes: > > [ Charset euc-kr unsupported, skipping... ] > > If your mail client cannot handle the charset, read: > > http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200601122020.59843.jkimSorry, my mail client did it again. :-( Jung-uk Kim
On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 10:41:50PM +0000, Scott Mitchell wrote:> Hi all, > > I may be getting a new Dell PE1850 soon, to replace our ancient CVS server > (still running 4-STABLE). The new machine will ideally run 6.0 and have a > PERC4e/DC RAID card - the one with battery-backed cache. This is listed as > supported by amr(4), but I'm wondering how well it actually works in the > case of a disk failure. Will the driver tell me that disk has failed (a > syslog message would be enough) or will I have to make a daily trip into > the server room to check the front panel lights? Presumably it handles > hot-swapping a replacement drive OK? > > I found some posts mentioning some management/monitoring tools for these > controllers that were allegedly available from the www.lsilogic.com > website, but I can't find anything on there for FreeBSD. Do the Linux > tools work?Following up to myself for the benefit of the archives - I can confirm that the PERC4e in the PE1850 works perfectly with amr(4) under 6.0. I've been using the sysutils/megarc port for managing the adapter from FreeBSD. It has a truly awful user interface but allows you to do everything that the BIOS setup program does, so far as I can tell. For monitoring we're relying on the email alerts from the DRAC/4 management card also in the machine, which turn out to work very well. We actually had a disk failure on the machine already (one of the drives had apparently worked itself a bit loose in transit and decided to power itself off a few days after I put the machine in the rack). The DRAC sent out an email when the drive "died", it auto-rebuilt when shoved back into the slot properly, then another email from the DRAC when the rebuild was complete. I'm looking forward to the amr(4) performance improvements in 6.1 and being able to run the Linux megmgr tool (I think this is the one with the same user interface as the BIOS setup program). Cheers, Scott -- ==========================================================================Scott Mitchell | PGP Key ID | "Eagles may soar, but weasels Cambridge, England | 0x54B171B9 | don't get sucked into jet engines" scott at fishballoon.org | 0xAA775B8B | -- Anon