Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2002 19:57:12 -0700 From: "Kenneth D. Merry" <ken@kdm.org> To: Christopher Smith <csmith@its.uq.edu.au> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Dell PowerVault Message-ID: <20021107195712.A61876@panzer.kdm.org> In-Reply-To: <6300CEEC-F2B9-11D6-9770-000502F96668@its.uq.edu.au>; from csmith@its.uq.edu.au on Fri, Nov 08, 2002 at 11:28:29AM %2B1000 References: <6300CEEC-F2B9-11D6-9770-000502F96668@its.uq.edu.au>
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On Fri, Nov 08, 2002 at 11:28:29 +1000, Christopher Smith wrote: > We are looking to setup a sorta-redundant pair of servers for a student > computer lab, consisting of a pair of 2650s and a Dell PowerVault > stuffed full of drives. The idea is to have all data related storage > on the PV (home dirs, squid cache, etc) which will be shared between > the two machines. In Case Of Emergency (tm) either machine should be > able to access whatever it is the now-broken machine was using > previously. > > Firstly, does anyone have any experience with the PowerVaults ? Do > they need any special driver support (and does FreeBSD have it) ? It's > somewhat unclear to me based on Dell's website whether or not the > enclosure itself has RAID capability in it, or if it is up to the HBAs > in the machines themselves to do the RAID. I am assuming I'll be able > to configure the PowerVault as one big chunk of space, partition it up. > plug a cable from each machine into it and mount the various partitions > on either box (as long as only ones tries to mount r/w at any given > time). Is this how it works ? The PowerVaults I have seen do not have any RAID functionality. All they have is enclosure services (which helps a RAID controller determine when a disk has been pulled, does environmental monitoring, etc.). They also have an auto-splitting feature (at least the ones I have seen). They've got two SCSI ports on the back, and if you hook up SCSI cables (I think it senses termination) to both, the SCSI bus will be split. So half the enclosure will be visible to one host, and half to the other. So if you want to do multiple initiators, you'll probably need a different enclosure. That said, you really won't be able to share the same drives very effectively in a multi-initiator environment. The best you can probably do is have some of the drives used by one machine, and the rest used by the other. Then if one goes down, you can mount the drives from the failed system and access the data. To do anything more than that would require something like Sistina's GFS: http://www.sistina.com/products.html Ken -- Kenneth Merry ken@kdm.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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