Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2007 08:59:43 -0500 From: Bill Moran <wmoran@collaborativefusion.com> To: "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@freebsd.org> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: [Opinions Wanted] Dell PowerEdge 2950 Servers ... Message-ID: <20070126085943.57633f7b.wmoran@collaborativefusion.com> In-Reply-To: <45C70401CEDC85AA7A692962@ganymede.hub.org> References: <45C70401CEDC85AA7A692962@ganymede.hub.org>
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In response to "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@freebsd.org>: > > Have a friend that swears by them, but ... he's in the Linux camp, so tends to > have a quasi-inside track ... > > What are ppls opinions on them as far as FreeBSD is concerned? > > Also, interested in what sort of specs ppl are running ... I'm interested in > going with an 8xSAS drive system, dual-dual-core, figuring 10 or 16G of RAM ... > redundant power and the Dell Remote Access Card ... We have 4 1950s and 3 2950s in use around here. Only one is actually in production so far, the rest are still being configured, etc. We're mostly happy with them. The following is a list of caveats: *) The version 5 DRAC is nicer than the version 4, _except_ that you have to use a Windows client to connect to it. May not be an issue for you, but all our admins here use FreeBSD on their workstations :( *) There's an issue where the systems will hang on reboot about 50% of the time. I tried to track this down but found that if I added any debugging code, the problem disappeared :( It's not a big deal for three reasons -- we don't reboot servers very often, the hang occurs after the disks are synced so it doesn't trigger an fsck, and we have DRAC cards in all of them :) *) The new PERC controllers use the mfi driver, which works well as far as we can tell ... unfortunately, there's no equivalent to megarc (which we use with 1850 and 2950 systems) so we have been unable to come up with a way to monitor the health of the RAID arrays from within the OS. *) Make sure you use a recent version of FreeBSD (6.2). The NIC cards on these use the bge driver, which was buggy as hell prior to 6.2. The biggest benefit we noticed when moving from the x850 to the x950 systems is that the IPMI and DRAC cards perform much better. It's a shame that Dell decided to use ActiveX for the v5 DRAC :( -- Bill Moran Collaborative Fusion Inc.
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