CentOS On HP DL360e With B120i
I am trying to install CentOS5 on a new HP DL360e G8 with B120i disk controller. It appears that a proprietary HP driver is needed for it.
I found a useful description at http://www.linuxhelp.in/2013/08/Installing-CentOS-on-HP-Proliant-DL360e-Gen8-with-B120i-controller.html
I have a pair of hard drives to use as a RAID1 mirror.
My question to people who may have been this way already is: is it worth my fiddling around with that procedure to get the RAID controller working, performance-wise, or might I just as well use AHCI mode with kernel mdraid?
I normally use Supermicro with AHCI and mdraid quite happily, but the customer wanted HP :(
Cheers Tony
8 thoughts on - CentOS On HP DL360e With B120i
fwiw, CentOS 6.recent should recognize that controller, I know it supports the P420i thats in the DL??0p Gen8 systems.
Silly question, why are you installing c5 on a new system, its lifecycle is already half over.
Tony Mountifield wrote:
Have you already set up the drives in the firmware to present to the o/s?
If you haven’t done that before, on a system that has all the drives going through the hardware controller, you need to know that you *must* go that way. After, the o/s will see it correctly as SATA/scsi.
With Dells and a PERC, even if you don’t want RAID, you *must* create it on your drives as raid 0? Something, and then it presents that as a drive.
Intel fakeRAID, I do that. For a real h/w RAID controller, you not only should use it, you *must* use it.
mark, who *really* dislikes SuperMicro m/b
In article <52CC4B9E.3090300@hogranch.com>, John R Pierce wrote:
Because it’s a complete turnkey system that we haven’t yet ported to C6;
that’s in the pipeline. :)
Cheers Tony
In article <525fd2f695e5e2f3215fc3c468a046e3.squirrel@host290.hostmonster.com>,
wrote:
Yes, I’ve been through the drive setup in the BIOS to create a RAID1 mirrored volume, and specified in the BIOS to use the Smart Array controller rather than plain AHCI mode.
Without HP’s proprietary driver, the kernel just sees the separate drives as AHCI
anyway, and according to the above instructions, even *with* the right driver it is necessary to blacklist the AHCI driver to prevent spurious detection of the bare drives.
As I said, the BIOS offers me the option of bypassing the RAID and just using the bare disks in AHCI mode, which I could easily do with mdraid.
I have no problem understanding the options and following the procedures. My question was just to see whether other people’s experience would suggest it was worth the effort of going down the hardware RAID and proprietary driver route.
Cheers Tony
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantstorage/arraycontrollers/dynamicsmartarray/
it looks like this is a software raid card, you’re probably better of just using mdraid unless your card has a flash backed write cache module
_or_ you need drive format compatibility with other smart array controllers.
“…Eliminating most of the hardware RAID controller components, and relocating advanced RAID algorithms from a hardware-based controller into device driver software lowers the total solution cost,..”
From: John R Pierce
AFAIK, B120i is a fake raid that needs an hp driver…
/begin_rant The same that is in the microserver g8 I sadly just bought… Sadly because: fake raid, no driver for 6.5 (yet) => kernel panic on 6.5. And, the icing on the cake: if you use AHCI instead, the so called super silent server sounds like an hair drier (drives temperature is only reported by the RAID drivers, so without RAID, they force the fan to a set speed… apparently close to 5 times the average speed: 6% => 30%)!
HP response: do not use AHCI… product works as expected…
/end_of_rant
Good: hp raid utilities and compatible with other hardware hp raid controllers if you upgrade later. Bad: install annoyances, dependance on driver to be up to date with OS release, and AHCI + mdraid is more portable?
JD
Agreed. If you need the same server with the supported 410 card, buy the DL360p series, and not the DL360e series.
I have one machine that’s an e-series, purchased by accident, and it loaded fine with the proprietary driver, but I’m sure it will be a minor headache going forward. HP went the cheap/bad route with the e-series.
In article <39999DB8-81B1-42E9-AD03-161F3C68DBC0@me.com>, Nathan Duehr wrote:
Interesting. Not normally using HP, I didn’t realise the difference. The last ones I had a few years ago did have the 410.
OK, well we’ll have to see how it goes. I found the proprietary driver was only available for 64-bit, and only up to C5.9. I’m currently using
32-bit with PAE, so I’ve turned off the B120i and just using AHCI with kernel RAID instead.
Cheers Tony