[CentOS] CentOS on Dell Poweredge 2850

[Ian Forde]

On Tue, 2008-09-16 at 16:35 +0700, Lunix1618 wrote:
> Sorin at Gmail wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Our department's planning to buy a refurbished Dell Poweredge 2850 running
> > dual-xeons and with a rather big raid array (8x 146GB).
> >
> > *My* plan is to install CentOS on this machine and I'd like to hear with you
> > guys if there are any gotchas' doing this.
> >
> > My main concern is the ability of CentOS to recognise the raid-controller of
> > the Dell and run a raid5-array as well as drivers for the onboard NICs.
> >   
> I am running Dell 2950 III and no issue with hardware recognization of 
> CentOs (5.2 Final)
> The one small thing is I can not extend the RAID volume because at the 
> beginning time we only have 03 HDD now when we buy new HDD we recognize 
> that RAID controller (PERC 6/i) doesn't support add new HDD to existing 
> volume :( so only a choice is rebuild it.

Uhh... check the DRAC - you may be able to extend the RAID5 array from
there underneath the OS.  You also may be able to do it using omconfig
after installing omsa.  This question really belongs on the Dell Linux
list though... I can say that I've expanded a RAID5 volume underneath
Windows quite recently on a 2850 and a 2950 without incident...

	-I