OT: Hardware: MegaCli And Initializing A RAID

Home » CentOS » OT: Hardware: MegaCli And Initializing A RAID
CentOS 8 Comments

Got a new box I’m trying to set up. I configured the RAID from the firmware, but “fast initialize” was sitting there at 0% (it’s about 43 or
45TB). The first time I tried this, I said background, and rebooted the system.

And the stupid annoying alarm started up as the system came up.

This time, having *finally* figured out how to set up hot spares from the WebBIOS, I suspended the fast initialization, and brought the system up.

Googling, I can’t find a command to continue the initialization. Anyone know of one, or is what I want to do rebuild the RAID?

mark

8 thoughts on - OT: Hardware: MegaCli And Initializing A RAID

  • I agree with what John said about their command line interface MegaCli. One thing I have noticed about LSI MegaRaids is: if you hot replace bad drive with good one of the same size or larger (which doesn’t have on it traces of being configured in any raid, not necessarily LSI), then the drive is accepted as replacement member into the same volume group, and array gets rebuilt in background automagically. You may want to check first if it is on its way rebuilding already.

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • Valeri Galtsev wrote:
    system up.

    Trust me, I’ve been cursing that interface for years now.

    Yeah, I checked with parted, and saw the full size, so then I thought to check the status of the RAID, and it said it was optimal, which I guess means it finished the fast initialization. Partitioned it, built an XFS
    filesystem, and it’s mounted.

    Has *ANYONE* at LSI/AVAGO *ever* had anyone other than the folks who wrote the code (or maybe that was Dilbert, himself) try to *use* it?

    mark

  • Agree. But I would say the same about all command line interface utilities for all RAID brands I ever used. LSI likely is the worst. But all of them IMHO are the way to get person even understanding what RAID is and what he is doing into trouble with potential grave consequences. They all use different terminology, often way off what things are usually called. Being OK command line (shell) person, and the one who otherwise prefers shell, when dealing with RAIDs I really-really prefer GUI like 3ware web interface. Sorry about rant.

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • It’s not that bad, the cli is incredibly detailed so it’s just vast. It’s not any different in complexity from hpacu in my opinion.

    That behavior is configurable, again it’s a matter of environment if that make sense for you.

    jlc

  • The old Adaptec AAC/AFA syntax was also awful, I’d say just as bad as LSI. (I have suspected that LSI copied most of the AAC UI.) 3ware was bad but not nearly as bad as the other two. (Though as you pointed out in another post, the 3ware line is basically dead. My vendor said the same thing.)

    I hated 3ware’s web interface. :)

    I think I’ve seen posted here before that some folks like the Areca controllers. What’s their CLI/GUI like?

    I think the worst part about these interfaces is that there really is no (at least that I’ve found) programming API to access them. If there were, we could write Python/Perl/Java/whatever code to interact with the controller, instead of having to parse stdout of MegaCli64.

    –keith