[OmniOS-discuss] Dell vs. Supermicro and any recommendations..

[Andy]

On Wed, 11 Mar 2015, Andy wrote:

;
; On Fri, 27 Feb 2015, Dan McDonald wrote:
;
; ;
; ; > On Feb 27, 2015, at 5:05 AM, Andy <omnios at citrus-it.net> wrote:
; ; >
; ; > If we go ahead, I'll let you all know how it goes!
; ;
; ; Please do that.  If you can zap a Dell Standard HBA out of HW-RAID and into a raw-disk controller, that'd be a HUGE WIN for illumos distros everywhere.
;
; Initial results look good to me. This is a Dell R730 with a PERC H730
; RAID card in it and just a pair of 300GB SAS disks for now. The card
; is configured in non-RAID/HBA mode through the standard BIOS menus.

I spoke too soon - disk performance seems generally poor with high service
times :( Everything's working apart from the disks briefly going away
at boot, just slow.

I have another server that I can try to elmininate the hardware but then I'll
need to start trying to diagnose this. If anyone has any thoughts on what to
look at first or commands to run I'd really appreciate it.

It's running with the mr_sas driver and the adapter is in HBA mode. It looks
like I have two options there - either HBA mode or RAID mode with the disks in
non-RAID mode; not sure what the difference is but I'll try both. In addition
to trying the second server, I'm also going to test with both firmware
revisions that are available for the PERC, RAID0 sets (just to see) and then
other OSs including Solaris 11 and whatever flavour of Linux is supported by
Dell.

Thanks,

Andy

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