Peter Bast wrote:
I want to use SuSE Linux 9.1 with a AMD Opteron single cpu and if possible with a 3ware raid controler (Escalade 7506-4LP). Has anybody experience with such a configuration. My most important question is: Which mainboard works safe and stable with SuSE Linux 9.1 and a AMD Opteron single cpu.
I am using an Escalade 7506-8 on a MSI K8D Master (dual Opteron) board running SLES 8. I had a lot of problems getting it all to work at first. But it is now working. The first thing you should do is check with the 3ware site to see which board they support, and what firmware (BIOS) upgrade you might need. They had some issues with their newer boards not working in PCI-X buses, or something like that, but that did not affect me. My problem with the motherboard had to do with out of date BIOSs, so once those were updated, the motherboard worked fine with the controllers. My more furstrating problems were with SLES 8, as the version on the origianl install CD needed a lot of patching. The strange thing was that the initial installation seemed to proceed correctly, and it even recognized the disks configured on the Escalade. But the machine would hang up when trying to boot. The procedure I eventually worked out was to do the initial install, remove the Escalade, boot the system and immediately apply all the patches. Then I can re-install the Escalade card and boot the system back up, and MOST things will appear to work: On the SLES 8/32 version, we introduced some kind of errors with the updates that prevented us from installing Oracle components. The initial install of Oracle was done BEFORE the patches, and those went fine. We ended up going to SLES 8/64, following the above procedure, and after Oracle released their support for Linux/64. Also, somewhere along the patches, the support for disks greater than 1TB started to work, but it was too late for us. We had already configured multiple LUNs of less than 1TB each because of initial problems with LUNs that were bigger. As a side note, the RAIDing functions of the Escalade cards are all done by their kernel drivers. Therefore, if you use a parity based RAID, like level 3 or level 5, you will be sucking down your CPU as you use those disks. I have mine configured in RAID 1+0, to get greater capacity, speed, and 100% redundancy. good luck, eyc