Topic: PowerEdge 2800 and PowerVault 220s

[newburns]

I have no idea where I could ask this, but I have grown to love this community, and google is not my friend right now.
I was given two Powervault 220s and a Poweredge 2800 complete with all drive bays filled with 36gb 15K Drives.

I am losing my mind trying to connect everything, and set up SME to run virtualization.

Does anyone have insight into connecting the powervaults to the Poweresge to setup the HW raid? I am under the assumption that software raid is not best in this scenario with so many drives, right?

Where I am now:
Leftmost SCSI port connected to leftmost Host SCSI Port, with configuration switch in joint-bus mode. When I go into Configuration Utility with (CTRL+M), I go to view/add configuration, and it just shows me the 5 drives that are onboard, however, on the bottom when it says it is scanning, it shows that it scans through 15 drives of Channel 1.
Please help me learn.   

[Jáder]

I'm not sure about what internal RAID card you got in your 2800... but I'd start searching for his manual.

if I read right you got a 2800 w/5x36g + 2x 220s w/14x36gb... that will be a hell of raid... wow.
a 16 disk raid (2x16 raid10) will delivery a serious througput... I've seen 1.5TB/sec at dell labs once using just 10 disks! hehehe

if you got just internal raid...i hope not! you should look for info about how to connect them (hope your raid has two ports).
if your raid ctrl has one port so your external 220s MAY have order (1 after other). try to swap them.

good luck.

Jáder

[newburns]

I have changed it now.
I went and found an HP DL380 G3 in the garbage. It had no internal components like memory or drives, but the motherboard, battery, and raid stuff was intact. It has the same spec and better over the PowerEdge 2800. I took all the components from the PowerEdge 2800.
The DL380 G3 has an extra external SCSI port from the internal 5i Raid Card. This allowed me to connect one PowerVault 220s to the external SCSI port. It worked like a charm. Now I have 6 - 36gb SCSI in machine, 2 - PowerVault 220s x 15 - 36gb SCSI. All are 15K, and all are ame manufacturer, Cheetah.

Questions:
1. I tested a configuration with a basic Raid 5 across 21-Drives (6-internal and 15-PowerVault). Should I set up another way to refrain from purchasing replacement hard drives later on? I the best configuration 36-drive Raid 5? How many hotpare is that?

2. There is only one onboard external SCSI port. It seems the PERC 4i card from the PowerEdge 2800 is no good. Can I set the PowerVault 220s to the "Split Bus" configuration and use the 2nd SCSI port on the PowerVault to connect the other PowerVault? Basically, can you daisy chain external SCSI Raid Controllers?

3. There were two DL380 G3 in the garbage I retrieved. How does clustering affect SME 8? Can I still daisy chain 2-PowerVault 220s while till clustering? The Map would like:
1 DL380 --> 1 Powervault 220s primary port (in Cluster Mode) --> 1 PowerVault 220s secondary port --> 2 PowerVault 220s primary port (in Cluster Mode) --> 2 PowerVault 220s secondary port --> 2 DL380

As of yet, I just want to run Plexi Media Server and a Windows PXE Boot for my church to service all the classrooms with boot images, and childrens' room's televisions to watch G rated movies and media.

4. Any other ideas what I could do with these extra servers? I currently have two in production. 1st is primary running all web, files, DHCP server, etc. 2nd is AFFA backup, only running a single 2tb raid disk (doubles as test server). I have two DL380 available, what else could I do with them?

[chris burnat]

This topic really belongs to General discussions.
Moving.