Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2007 15:17:05 -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: <20070126151705.97c1bc22.wmoran@collaborativefusion.com> In-Reply-To: <015AA8BA9840861EAC66E8B7@ganymede.hub.org> References: <45C70401CEDC85AA7A692962@ganymede.hub.org> <20070126085943.57633f7b.wmoran@collaborativefusion.com> <015AA8BA9840861EAC66E8B7@ganymede.hub.org>
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In response to "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@freebsd.org>: [snip] > > *) 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 :) > > 'k, so the hang is as it's coming down, not coming up, right? Correct. > > *) 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. > > With the HP server, 'camcontrol devlist' shows: > > <COMPAQ RAID 1 VOLUME OK> > > Nothing similar with the mfi driver? Heh ...: [root@db04 ~]# camcontrol devlist -v scbus-1 on xpt0 bus 0: < > at scbus-1 target -1 lun -1 (xpt0) Figure that one out. > Also, are you using SAS or SATA on your 2950? SAS. > > *) 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. > > So I've heard, but I have bge on 3 of my HP servers, and never had a problem > with them under 6.1 ... I'm sooo unlike everywhere else, guess I had to have > some luck somewhere :) The problem occurs with heavy use of UDP, so it's possible not to notice it if you're not doing NFS or doing NFS over tcp. When I tripped over it, I realized that the NFS was configured wrong :), but I wanted to get it fixed before we deployed anyway, just in case we started using heavy UDP. When the problem occurs, the adapter is unusable until a reboot, so it's pretty severe. > > 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 :( > > If its a solid machine, how often do you have to access the DRAC though? :) Just often enough to be annoyed by it. Keep in mind that we're still deploying them, which means we're installing kernels and testing things and moving them around -- a lot of rebooting that is occurring less and less as they near actual deployment, but is pretty annoying at the time. > Can you post your 2950 configuration? Kernel config? -- Bill Moran Collaborative Fusion Inc.
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