This weekend I had to build a server for a customer. The hardware was given by the customer- I only had to set it up. Unfortunately I ran into a bunch of troubles, as Dell shipped the wrong hardware (sadly I noticed this much to late).
Given hardware was a
Dell PowerEdge 1950 with Quad Core CPU and 4 GiB RAM. The server has 2 x73 GiB internal hard disks (SAS) and (currently) 4 x 500 GiB disks in a
Dell PowerVault MD1000 (SAS) storage array. So far, so good... When I booted the machine the first time, I wondered why the systems disks were connected to a RAID controller (a PERC 5/i) - but I simply went on. The
Solaris installer started and everything worked fine - at least until the installer reached the point where it wanted to partition the disks... "No disks found" was the message, the installer showed.
I rebooted and tried to disable the RAID-support of the controller, so that it only acts as SAS controller and passes the single drives through, but the PERC 5/i doesn't have a option for JBOD. So I looked up the chipset on the controller (
LSISAS1068), downloaded the
Solaris x86 driver from the LSI homepage and burned it on CD. Again the Solaris installer started and I chose "5" for "apply driver update", followed by "c" for CD. The installer recognized the driver on the CD, installed it, but when I executed "format", the disks still weren't found.
After some research in the internet I figured out, that the LSI 1068 controllers, that are shipped with Dell hardware, are confiugred with another firmware - which isn't supported by the LSI driver ... and of course Dell doesn't provide and Solaris driver.
Luckily, after some further research in tons of internet forums, I found an thread about Dell 2950 in the SUN forum. In this discussion, someone announced that he has written a driver for the LSI MegaRaid and Dell Perc 5 controllers for Solaris 10. The driver can be found
here. I first tried to update the driver directly in the Solaris 10 installation DVD (or more specificly within the x86.miniroot) but this very annoying if you only have a VMWare with the correct Solaris version, so that you can build the driver. Additionally the driver would be only available during the installation - I would have needed to install it manually after the installation as well. What a luck that someone built an ITU image, which can be used for the Solaris 10 installer. I made a mirror of the
package with the driver and the
ITU images (as I don't know, how long
the site will life).
Finally - with the ITU image - I was able to install solaris on the RAID-1 that I built on the 2 system disks. The installation worked w/o any problems... business as usual. But the next shock came quickly. The next task I wanted to do, was installing the MD1000 disks as one RAID-Z ZFS pool. But guess what... Dell again shipped the wrong hardware. The ordered SAS controller wasn't installed... therefor a PERC 5/E was installed - and of course this RAID controller isn't able to pass the disks through as JBOD neither. Well, what should I do? I set up a RAID-5 on the PERC controller, so that Solaris at least sees the disk(s).
The system is now up and running in the DC but it is really annoying that:
- Dell isn't able to ship the ordered hardware
- Dell needs it's fucking own firmware on standard LSI hardware
- Dell doesn't provide Solaris drivers for their own hardware
- The crappy PERC controllers don't provide JBOD-support
Conclusion: Solaris on a Dell 1950 with a MD1000 works, but it's really hard to get it working when a PERC controller is installed. I recommend to either not order a PERC controller but a standard SAS controller or to buy your own controllers.
Update: Yesterday the re-ordered SAS 5/E controller (original LSI SAS1068 chipset) arrived and I mounted it into the Dell 1950. The 4 x 500GB disks in the MD1000 were directly recognized by the controller and the controller was automatically initialized by Solaris 10's mpt driver. All 4 disks were found by "devfsadm" and I could quickly rebuild my ZFS pool. Now I'm happy with the box. So here again my advise- be very accurate with the hardware that you order in your Dell 1950. If you want to add a MD1000 and want ZFS to take care of the RAID, then be careful not to order a PERC 5/i or PERC 5/E controller but to take the SAS version (SAS 5/i and SAS 5/E) which passes the MD1000 through as JBOD to the Solaris operating system and which works out-of-the-box with Solaris' mpt driver.
), that SUN is not going to agree with NetApps allowances and that they'll use their patents to defend and protect their innovations and the open source community. From my sight, a very nice move of SUN as it's good to know, that the open source community has a big player in their rows.
