[rescue] RAID on Solaris x86

[Earl D. Baugh Jr.]

> Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
>> On Wed, 14 May 2008, Phil Stracchino wrote:
>>
>>> The bad news:  There's no point in me running Solaris 10 on it  
>>> because
>>> the 3Ware 9500 controller in it is completely unsupported under
>>> Solaris x86.  Can't see the disks at all.  And if I don't run  
>>> Solaris
>>> 10 or OpenSolaris on it, I don't get to use ZFS or zones.
>>
>> Yep.  I hit that -exact- -same- -blockade- with my Xeon box.  Neither
>> 3ware nor Sun is inclined to support the other's products for some
>> reason.
>>
>> FreeBSD 7, however, has excellent support for those devices, and I've
>> been very happy with it.  I don't get the virtualization stuff I  
>> wanted
>> to play with under Solaris, but I get an OS that talks to my storage.
>
> Further study seems to show that the only PCI-X SATA RAID controller
> supported under OpenSolaris/Solaris 10 x86 is the Tekram TR-834A.  And
> apparently in JBOD mode, it works just fine with ZFS.

I don't know about Open Solaris, but I just got (for free... yes,  
"SCORE" )
an LSI 8 channel SAS PCI-X RAID Controller... and it has Solaris  
drivers.
Definitely something I wouldn't have budget for without the "free"  
part 8-)
(I didn't check to see if they were x86 or Sparc yet, as it went into  
an Intel
motherboard...the first I got that will support a quad core processor...
and has 12 USB ports....)

Helps to have a friend who's a VP at LSI 8-)

Works great with SATAII drives.... got a 2TB formatted RAID 5 volume  
on it... 500GB drives...
got room in the case for 2 more drives using the standard mounting...  
which will leave me
1 drive short of using all the connectors.   So, not quite in the 10TB  
range of others here
(at least not yet 8-) )but 3TB easily.

And, to make it easy for what I've got to use it for here, I decided
to start at least with XP 64 bit for the OS.  Haven't played with  
Solaris x86
(or any of the other Unix x86, aside from Linux, which I really didn't  
want to use...)
so had to settle for that.  Nice Intel board as well.. aside from the  
12 USB ports,
has firewire, gig E, and support for 8GB of ram (has 4GB in it now).   
Fit nicely
in the rack mount SGI case, which has the room for 9 drives using the  
designed
mounting, so overall a nice usable configuration. I figure I'll go to  
Solaris x86 when
I upgrade drives and buy those first 3 1TB drives (and have the space  
to move what's
on the current volume around while I get comfortable with the RAID  
under Solaris.

Side note, has anybody here ever tried using Firewire as a networking  
mechanism?
I see the connectors as "network adapters" under XP, and just was  
wondering how
it compared to other X-Base-T configs...

Earl