Hi all,
Would anybody care to suggest a third party SATA-RAID card that works out of the box with CentOS 6, without having to jump through hoops to make it work?
The card should preferably be able to connect ten harddrives, but I guess three four-port cards should work as well. There's no need for anything fancy really, as long as I can create a single big software-raid on it at CentOS install-time.
So far I've tried a Highpoint RocketRAID 2740 and a LSI 9201-16i without too much success.
Thanks for any suggestions in advance!
On 12/5/2013 12:49 AM, Sorin Srbu wrote:
Would anybody care to suggest a third party SATA-RAID card that works out of the box with CentOS 6, without having to jump through hoops to make it work?
The card should preferably be able to connect ten harddrives, but I guess three four-port cards should work as well. There's no need for anything fancy really, as long as I can create a single big software-raid on it at CentOS install-time.
10 hard drives should be plugged into a SAS backplane, even if they are SATA drives, and driven by a SAS controller, using a 4 channel SAS cable. anything else is ghetto.
you said RAID card, then you talk about JBOD? which is it.
the LSI SAS 920x family should work just fine at this. if it didn't you got cabling problems.
at centos install time, you don't create a single big software raid out of anything, you create mirrors for your OS root and /boot file systems, then after the system is running, you create your big raid 10 or whatever as your data volume, make that LVM, put /home and /var on it if you want, whatever.
-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of John R Pierce Sent: den 5 december 2013 09:58 To: centos@centos.org Subject: Re: [CentOS] Third-party SATA-RAID cards suggestions
10 hard drives should be plugged into a SAS backplane, even if they are SATA drives, and driven by a SAS controller, using a 4 channel SAS cable. anything else is ghetto.
It might be considered that, it was a cheap solution. Not necessarily the best one.
you said RAID card, then you talk about JBOD? which is it.
Primarily RAID.
the LSI SAS 920x family should work just fine at this. if it didn't you got cabling problems.
Thank you for the hint. The setup worked fine with Windows 2012 R2, which saw both card and disks and was able to create a raid0-array for testing. CentOS 5/6 didn't for some reason.
at centos install time, you don't create a single big software raid out of anything, you create mirrors for your OS root and /boot file systems, then after the system is running, you create your big raid 10 or whatever as your data volume, make that LVM, put /home and /var on it if you want, whatever.
I apologize for any confusion. For linux-servers I usually install CentOS on a separate system disk, with user-data on another separate disk or as in this case on the other ten drives which are to form a single raid-array.
-- //Sorin
On 12/05/2013 09:49 PM, Sorin Srbu wrote:
Hi all,
Would anybody care to suggest a third party SATA-RAID card that works out of the box with CentOS 6, without having to jump through hoops to make it work?
The card should preferably be able to connect ten harddrives, but I guess three four-port cards should work as well. There's no need for anything fancy really, as long as I can create a single big software-raid on it at CentOS install-time.
So far I've tried a Highpoint RocketRAID 2740 and a LSI 9201-16i without too much success.
I have two servers with various RocketRaid cards installed - you do have to jump some hoops to make them work but they seem to work just fine once set up properly - you need to recompile/link for every kernel update - I have a script that I run to make it painless (YMMV). Feel free to contact me off list if you want a copy of my setup notes. You may also want to check epel repo, I recall they had some kmod setup for some of these cards.
Thanks for any suggestions in advance!
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Rob Kampen Sent: den 5 december 2013 10:57 To: CentOS mailing list Subject: Re: [CentOS] Third-party SATA-RAID cards suggestions
So far I've tried a Highpoint RocketRAID 2740 and a LSI 9201-16i without too much success.
I have two servers with various RocketRaid cards installed - you do have to jump some hoops to make them work but they seem to work just fine once set up properly - you need to recompile/link for every kernel update - I have a script that I run to make it painless (YMMV). Feel free to contact me off list if you want a copy of my setup notes. You may also want to check epel repo, I recall they had some kmod setup for some of these cards.
I'm trying to minimize the jumping through hoops, but thanks! -- //Sorin
On 2013-12-05, Sorin Srbu Sorin.Srbu@orgfarm.uu.se wrote:
Would anybody care to suggest a third party SATA-RAID card that works out of the box with CentOS 6, without having to jump through hoops to make it work?
The card should preferably be able to connect ten harddrives, but I guess three four-port cards should work as well. There's no need for anything fancy really, as long as I can create a single big software-raid on it at CentOS install-time.
There's little reason to do that if you have a real hardware RAID card. (I won't say "no reason", but it would have to be extremely compelling for it to be wise to go that route.)
So far I've tried a Highpoint RocketRAID 2740 and a LSI 9201-16i without too much success.
The MegaRAID 9271 works OOTB with CentOS 6.4. Every 3ware card (also from LSI) I've used also works OOTB with CentOS. If you are new to hardware RAID, the 3ware interface is a lot easier to learn than the MegaRAID's. (I suspect that other LSI cards, including the 9201, work fine with CentOS too; perhaps you can post your error messages so we can see what's wrong, instead of replacing a working controller.)
On 12/5/2013 7:56 AM, Keith Keller wrote:
The card should preferably be able to connect ten harddrives, but I guess
three four-port cards should work as well. There's no need for anything fancy really, as long as I can create a single big software-raid on it at CentOS install-time.
There's little reason to do that if you have a real hardware RAID card. (I won't say "no reason", but it would have to be extremely compelling for it to be wise to go that route.)
well, 3 4 port hardware raid cards wouldn't be able to make a single raid, you'd at best get 3 seperate raids, one per card, and when managing it, you'd need to track which drive is on which card.
re hardware raid cards, I've not had any issues using LSI 926x-8i cards (x = 0,1, different connector locations mostly), these are MegaRAID SAS2 cards. again, with a SAS expander on a single 4-channel connector, I've had as many as 36 SATA drives (in a RAID6+0, organized as 3 x 11 drives, plus 3 hot spares), and gotten very good performance.
-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of John R Pierce Sent: den 5 december 2013 18:55 To: centos@centos.org Subject: Re: [CentOS] Third-party SATA-RAID cards suggestions
well, 3 4 port hardware raid cards wouldn't be able to make a single raid, you'd at best get 3 seperate raids, one per card, and when managing it, you'd need to track which drive is on which card.
Ok, poor research on my part. I assumed I could make a single big array using three cards. Bummer... Sorry about that one.
re hardware raid cards, I've not had any issues using LSI 926x-8i cards (x = 0,1, different connector locations mostly), these are MegaRAID SAS2 cards. again, with a SAS expander on a single 4-channel connector, I've had as many as 36 SATA drives (in a RAID6+0, organized as 3 x 11 drives, plus 3 hot spares), and gotten very good performance.
So LSI 926x-cards works OOTB then?
-- //Sorin
-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Keith Keller Sent: den 5 december 2013 16:57 To: centos@centos.org Subject: Re: [CentOS] Third-party SATA-RAID cards suggestions
So far I've tried a Highpoint RocketRAID 2740 and a LSI 9201-16i without too much success.
The MegaRAID 9271 works OOTB with CentOS 6.4. Every 3ware card (also from LSI) I've used also works OOTB with CentOS. If you are new to hardware RAID, the 3ware interface is a lot easier to learn than the MegaRAID's. (I suspect that other LSI cards, including the 9201, work fine with CentOS too; perhaps you can post your error messages so we can see what's wrong, instead of replacing a working controller.)
Okay, thanks.
I see several of you guys say that the Megaraid as well as the LSI-card should work out of the box with CentOS. My understanding is that the necessary driver modules are already built into the kernel. Am I assuming this correctly that the card should therefore be seen at install with no tweaking?
In any case, I sent the thing back to the dealer yesterday. Awaiting their testing results. -- //Sorin
On 12/5/2013 11:18 PM, Sorin Srbu wrote:
I see several of you guys say that the Megaraid as well as the LSI-card should work out of the box with CentOS. My understanding is that the necessary driver modules are already built into the kernel. Am I assuming this correctly that the card should therefore be seen at install with no tweaking?
you have to configure a megaraid card so it knows what to do with your disks, either create a raid or multiple raids, or configure it for all-disks-as-jbod. this /can/ be done with the bios, but its really annoying to use, I generally put a copy of megacli on a USB stick and boot my installation media with 'single' to run it, otherwise the linux kernel doesn't see them.
-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of John R Pierce Sent: den 6 december 2013 08:32 To: centos@centos.org Subject: Re: [CentOS] Third-party SATA-RAID cards suggestions
I see several of you guys say that the Megaraid as well as the LSI-card should work out of the box with CentOS. My understanding is that the necessary driver modules are already built into the kernel. Am I assuming this correctly that the card should therefore be seen at install with no tweaking?
you have to configure a megaraid card so it knows what to do with your disks, either create a raid or multiple raids, or configure it for all-disks-as-jbod. this /can/ be done with the bios, but its really annoying to use, I generally put a copy of megacli on a USB stick and boot my installation media with 'single' to run it, otherwise the linux kernel doesn't see them.
BIOS... Now when you mention it, I didn't see any message on the screen at POST from the raid-card. Don't cards like these usually throw a message about setup, raid status, found harddrives etc during POST. This one didn't.
-- //Sorin
On 12/6/2013 12:04 AM, Sorin Srbu wrote:
BIOS... Now when you mention it, I didn't see any message on the screen at POST from the raid-card. Don't cards like these usually throw a message about setup, raid status, found harddrives etc during POST. This one didn't.
the megaraid bios is nasty complex to use. and maybe you got a card without it ... you're really better off booting linux from a CD, net, whatever, to shell and using megacli. of course, megacli doesn't /come/ with linux, so you have to get it, and make it available to your standalone linux of choice (the centos installation boot at a linux single will do, if you can access media with megacli on it.
and yes, as has been said before, megacli is a rather messy complex command line. I found it much easier to understand when I stopped using -'s on all the options (the - is optional) and stopped using camelcase, then the commands are less messy. I ended up making my own cheatsheet of common megacli commands formatted that way
On 2013-12-06, John R Pierce pierce@hogranch.com wrote:
and yes, as has been said before, megacli is a rather messy complex command line.
The newer storcli command line tool is slightly less horrifying. There are also GUI tools, but I don't have a lot of experience with them.
If you have a system drive/array that's not on these controllers, you can install the OS first, then download megacli/storcli and configure your big array.
And just as the 3ware CLI is easier to use than MegaCLI/storcli, the 3ware BIOS is easier to use than the megaraid BIOS, and it's fairly straightforward to build arrays. This is why I often suggest 3ware over Megaraid for admins who are new to hardware RAID--I found that solid experience with 3ware's CLI was a big help in deciphering the incomprehensible MegaCLI/storcli docs.
--keith
Keith Keller wrote:
On 2013-12-06, John R Pierce pierce@hogranch.com wrote:
and yes, as has been said before, megacli is a rather messy complex command line.
The newer storcli command line tool is slightly less horrifying. There are also GUI tools, but I don't have a lot of experience with them.
I have used the gui. You d/l the "MegaRAID Storage Manager" (aka MSM) and untar it. ssh -Y in, and run ./startupui.sh. It actually works tolerably well. <snip>
mark
-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Sorin Srbu Sent: den 6 december 2013 08:19 To: CentOS mailing list Subject: Re: [CentOS] Third-party SATA-RAID cards suggestions
In any case, I sent the thing back to the dealer yesterday. Awaiting their testing results.
The dealer just called back and let me know their linux-specialist had had a look at the card and flashed a new BIOS to it. After this the card was found properly by the OS.
Just as well they did it. If I'd botched the flash procedure, warranty would have been void...
In any case, the dealer apologized for them not having seen this from the start, and offered the fix free of charge.
Seems like all is well and problem solved.
Thanks for all the feedback on this issue! You're great!
-- //Sorin
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John R Pierce -
Keith Keller -
m.roth＠5-cent.us -
Rob Kampen -
Sorin Srbu