HIT for RHEL 7

you made me smile. el 7.1 is right in front of the door, and still no sign of dells great hit kit. if you think, how long it took dell in the past to update the hitkit for example from el 6.4 to 6.5 ... 6+ months. dunno if theres a version for the latest el6 yet, somehow i feel like heres none for sure.

equallogic linux support is a very special story... i little bit overdone but...: nearly every el cheapo iscsi san is better in that term. or simply doesnt need a a special driver.

for me, i am done with equallogic after 4 years with several different arrays (61xx, 4xxx - 1G / 10G - SSD only). only trouble, buggy firmwares, unbelievible release times for hit kits.

expect a sales guy who tries to sell you enterprise storage contacting you ;) compellent.

cheers,

The next HIT/LE version is expected in the March/April timeframe.  It will support 7.0 and 7.1.

Jgotteswinter, I'm sorry that your experience has been so discouraging.   However,  EQL does not REQUIRE any special driver in order to work with Linux.   The HIT kit does provide enhanced MPIO capabilities.  Consistent snapshots, and replication.  It will also run UNMAP/RECLAIM operations with supported filesystems.   There is also a very nice PERL and PYTHON library to allow further customization with Linux.    Also the current HIT/LE kit does support the latest 6.x release.

Regards,

I want also the HIT for linux.

Dell.com had some months ago a big «Dell Supports RHEL 7» on his home page.

Obviously they missed equallogic out.

so, am i wrong or is there still nothing available? somehow, i am not surprised. reflects and confirms the experience i had over the last 2-3 years. rhel6 hit kit took months after its release, too.

it isnt like redhat does not release beta candidates of their upcoming release, one could up to the idea that porting could be already started on a beta release. but anyway, since the latest kernels include the equallogic dm_switch module there is just the userspace part missing. if the ehcmd part whould be available as source... can i file this as "rfe"?

June and nothing new.

The only update we have is that HIT/Linux v1.4 is now sometime as early as late Q2 or sometime in Q3-Q4 2015 to coincide with the GA release of v8 of the firmware.

Joe

We anticipate release of the software to the web by early October

Dear Keith,

i'm new to EQL, therefore not acquainted how DELL/EQL handles software releases in general: since i desperately need RHEL 7, would there be an option to get hold of pre releases of that HIT kit? I'm not afraid of a bumpy road...

Best

Hello Don,

thank you for pointing out that HIT is not mandatory/essential, i wasn't sure about that.

I'll figure out whether this is sufficient for the time being.

Best

H

Hello H,

You are very welcome.  Was there some feature in particular you were looking for from HIT/LE?   HIT/LE is most beneficial when you have large multimember pools and require as much I/O from that group as possible.  It's most common benefit is making installation and configuration of iSCSI / MPIO very simple in Linux.  Along with the eqltune utility to verify and set the most common parameters insuring best performance.  Those can be done manually.  

Something that seems to often get missed, is mounting volumes with the 'discard' option so that Linux filesystems that support SCSI UNMAP (aka space reclaim) will send the proper SCSI command to the array when files are deleted.   Filesystems like EXT4, XFS, ZFS, GFS, etc...  

(Note: UNMAP isn't supported on Dell/EQL volumes that use array based replication)

Regards,

Don

forget it, there wont be any update ... just tactic to keep customers away from them.

btw, since some of the 6100xv i operate its great to see that one after one controller board dies in this series. just very short after warranty was over (4-5 boards meanwhile, every 1-2 weeks one). of course we are the only ones who got this problems (yes dell keeps telling this, not very creative for a story).

but thats another thing... what i want to say, the impression that eql is a dead end is more and more something one could not ignore anymore.

if there whould be any work in progress, why does dell not provide beta releases... they did that in the past (ok, when the hitkit update was released it was already oudated most of the time because the next  rhel release had been pushed out meanwhile) . but, this whould be a way to proove that there is really something upcoming.

i just can suggest to stay away if you are running a linux setup where the eql should be integrated.

Never thrilled to see a blind - anonymous - negative message like this. I thought it was actually pretty nice of product management to post a fairly specific release date in response to the confusion around HIT for RHEL 7.0. I brought it to their attention and they jumped right on it. Not really the kind of attitude associated with a dead product.