Interesting news about PERC 6/i

jdelliott · 28. September 2016

Here is an interesting thing that I found out about Dell PERC 6/i (and maybe all?) Raid controllers. I have a Poweredge 2900 that came with this card. Installed OMV on it, with (8) 750 Gig SATA drives, each in their own RAID 0 container. From everything that I have read, this is as close as these cards will get to JBOD, which was my experience. If you leave them unconfigured in the RAID BIOS, OMV cannot see them, they don't exist.

Anyway, I didn't like that situation, so I decided to purchase a PERC 6/iR, which is a RAID 0 and 1 card, but that WILL pass through unconfigured drives to the OS.

Installed the card, hoked up the cables. Got a SAS A cable missing/misconfigured, press F1 to continue message. Kinda defeats the purpose of having it down in the basement, which means that if I have to reboot I have to go and hit a key, but whatever, everything works other than that. I've seen posts about buying some Highpoint cables and some other things. Maybe in the future, I can deal with it for now. The other thing is that the lights for the online status don't light, again would be nice but I can live with it. Activity LEDs do light up when drives are being written, etc.

What I find interesting, and other might like to know, is that apparently a single drive RAID 0 on this card is, for all intents and purposes, JBOD. I was expecting to have to wipe the drives from the OMV GUI, at the very least, to get rid of whatever info the PERC 6/i had written in the MBR during the initializing process.

NOPE!!! OMV saw the drives right away, and I could read and access it just fine, nothing further needed to be done. Just to check, I pulled a drive out of the hotswap area, and connected it to the internal SATA port on the 2900. It read it there just fine.

The only major issue to this, is that you cannot get SMART info from the drive, nor serial numbers, etc. It just reads it in OMV as PERC 6/i. But the issue of being able to access your data, which is the most important, should the hardware fail, is a big, resounding, Don't Worry About It.

I hope this helps anybody else who has one of these cards and is concerned about the "extra" layer of hardware RAID

ryecoaaron · 28. September 2016

Zitat von jdelliott

press F1 to continue message. Kinda defeats the purpose of having it down in the basement, which means that if I have to reboot I have to go and hit a key

Why don't you use idrac (dell remote administration)?

vl1969 · 28. September 2016

actually I think this model came with IPMI 2.0 standard. not iDRAC
just configure remote management (openManage I think) set the IP and port
than you can just navigate to the IP via browser or using IPMI tools

the only thing that could be an issue is that most DELL remote management options are licence based and even if you have some control over the server remotely you may not have a console to see the "Screen".
Yes they disable remote console access as a pay for option! I just got a new DELL PE 730dx, 2 of them actually, where basic iDRAC license does not let you view the console.
you need a pay-for version to get that.
but this server is so old it may have the older version of remote soft where it was open and free.

ryecoaaron · 28. September 2016

I have a poweredge 2900. It has drac5. I got it used so it must have the license to do remote management. I haven't used it in years though.

vl1969 · 28. September 2016

oh.. no, you can use the iDRAC as remote management even on newer system,it is iDRAC8 BTW but I do have an PE310 with iDRAC6 and it is the same thing , it just limited in what you can do. you can check the status of the hardware, reboot etc..
you just can not get to remote screen view like real IPMI so kind of defeat the whole remote admin experience if I have to be at the server console to do anything but check the system stats.

I have read up on this and consensus is that older versions of iDRAC did not have this restriction. they had access to video console.

jdelliott · 29. September 2016

I do not have a DRAC card in the server, and have not set up the IP address for the BMC that the BIOS provides. Currently in the middle of redoing my router, IP addressing scheme, etc, so not sure where in my IP space I am going to place administration/infrastructure "stuff" like the BMC IP address. I don't even know what the BMC capabilities are, but I am pretty sure it is limited compared to a full-on DRAC 5 card like my server would take. There is a company local to me that deals in Dell stuff (http://www.stikc.com for those interested, they sell on eBay quite a bit mostly). They have the DRAC card, for $7, but do not have the cabling. They have the cables for a 2950, but they recycled all of their 2900 stuff about 4-5 months ago, they said, when I went there to buy the PERC 6/iR card (Got it for a steal, I paid $6!)

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