On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 06:49:34PM +1000, Russell Coker wrote:
I have just received a free HP DL-385 system, it's quite a nice server with 16G of RAM, 3*SATA and 5*SAS disks.
I want to set it up to run Linux software RAID-1 with Ext4 on a pair of SATA disks for booting and ZFS RAID-Z2 on the 5*SAS disks for data storage.
if you can, use the third SATA port for the RAID-Z array as well - RAID-Z gets better performance when the number of data disks in an array is a power of 2 (e.g. 4 data disks + 1 parity for RAID-Z1, or 4 data disks + 2 parity for RAID-Z2). the performance difference isn't crippling or even huge, but it is noticable. OTOH, if performance were the most important criteria, then a pool made up of mirrored pairs of drives would be beter (similar to RAID-10) hmmm...depending on your I/O workload, you might be better off putting an SSD in the third SATA port, partitioned to give you a smallish ZIL (4 or 8GB would be heaps) to smooth out sync. writes, and the remainder as L2ARC cache.
The problem I have is that the boot disks were wiped, the DVD drive is broken and ILO isn't licensed for remote disk access. This combined with the fact that USB booting apparently doesn't work (it doesn't boot with my usual USB boot device) means that I have to make the SATA disks bootable before connecting them.
can you get the server to pxe boot? if so, you could set up a debian installer on a local tftp server. all you need is dhcpd and a tftpd (strongly recommend ipxe as a 2nd stage so you can load the debian installer image with http rather tftp) if you need pointers on how to do this, i can send you relevant snippets of my dhcpd.conf and tftp setup.
Does anyone know what the CCISS disk format is for a single disk RAID-0 (IE a JBOD)? Presumably there is some offset where I can just put an image of a regular bootable SATA disk and have it work.
have you tried just putting a regular bootable disk in? it's been a while since i last used a hp smart array so i can't remember if you have to go into the smart-array bios setup and configure it for JBOD (or, as you say, single-disk-raid-0 because HP's smart-array isn't as smart as the name implies). craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>