Rhugga wrote:
Just checking the main HBA vendors that I normally use (Emulex, JNI, and QLogic) only to find that none had drivers for SLES 9.
Just curious what HBA's people are using under SLES 9? snip
The short answer is that we are using Intel single-channel RAID adapters - model # SRCU42L. Ironically these are in dual AMD Opteron motherboards. And I do not believe that Intel lists support for SLES 9 - but the card does work fine. Our Servers use Tyan S2880 and S2882 motherboards with buildin SCSI and a "zero-channel raid" slot. We tried to use the Adaptec 2015S "zero-channel raid" cards - but they are not supported under either SLES 8 or SLES 9. So our vendor recommended the Intel cars and we have been very happy so far (just setting up the second server with same now). They just work. I imagine the Adaptec 2120S single channel RAID card will work - but do not know for sure. It and the Intel card are about the same price - US $440. They idea of using the Tyans and one of the ZCR cards (liek the Adaptec 2015S) seemed like a more economical way to go as it was only about US $215. But that was not to be the case. Sometimes more expensive hardware is cheaper. I do software RAID on some less critical systems, but its a lot of work compared to a real hardware raid solution such as the Intel, Adaptec or even the 3Ware cards. I've heard all the argument about how its just as good and can take advantage of faster CPUs - but I don't buy it. (Un)fortunately, the Windows drivers for the cheap raid solutions (bios-based motherboard or add-in card) do a pretty good job of giving you the ease of setup of a real hardware raid system. Too bad the drivers for Linux do not work so well. Hope this helps. - Richard