PE6450 OMSA

[Shane Corbin]

Unfortuneately software raid just isn't an acceptible solution at this point. 
Whether or not the 6450 as a whole is supported in OMSA 5.x doesn't seem to be the
issue, as everything works except for the management of this controller.  Is there
some kind of CLI tool that can manage this controller.  Hardware raid is absolutely
necessary in our implementation.  I have had this issue with all versions of OMSA
that I have been able to find, eg. 3.x - 5.x, so I am not so sure that it is a
support issue.  I recently had a PE2450 with the same exact controller and it
worked just fine.  If this machine is out of the scope, chronologically, is there
another list or perhaps an archive that you can refer me too.  Your help is much
appreciated.


On Mon, May 5, 2008 10:57, Matt Domsch wrote:
> On Mon, May 05, 2008 at 10:24:55AM -0500, Shane Corbin wrote:
>> I have a Dell Poweredge 6450 with a PERC 2/DC raid controller.  I have installed
>> the newest version of omsa available for debian through the apt repository
>> ftp://ftp.sara.nl/pub/sara-omsa/
>
> OMSA 5.x shouldn't support the 6450 any more.  It's what, 7+ years old now?
>
>> The web interface works great and so do the om utilities.  Except for one thing.
>> The om utils do not recognize teh PERC 2/DC as a storage controller.  All of my
>> disks are managed with the PERC 2/DC due to the fact that the embedded AIC-7899P
>> controller is not raid capable.  This is the main reason for using these
>> utilities.
>>  When a drive goes bad, I have to powerdown the machine in order to enter the
>> controller bios to silence the alarm, rebuild array, etc...
>
> You could hook up the drives to the aic7xxx controller and use Linux
> software RAID.  I've recommended this to people who have such old
> hardware for several years now.  The drive bays themselves are
> electrically hot-pluggable, and mdadm can be used to kick off the logical
> add/remove/rebuild commands.
>
>> If anyone has any experience with the PERC 2/DC controller with the om utils
>> please
>> help.  Dell tech support mentioned that I may need to use the array manager, I do
>> not see an "Array Manager."  Before switching to debian linux, the omsa installed
>> with windows server 2003 managed this controller just fine.
>
> Array Manager was the Windows-only application, predating OMSA's
> inclusion of Storage Services, that was intended to manage that
> hardware.  As noted above, OMSA 5.x no longer supports that hardware.
>
>
> --
> Matt Domsch
> Linux Technology Strategist, Dell Office of the CTO
> linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux
>


-- 
Shane Corbin
Independant Computer Consultant
corbin.sl at gmail.com