Installing Linux on PV 745N

Question

Has anyone been able to install any Linux distro on a PowerVault 745N?   All the distros (RedHat, Centos, Fedora) we've tried have problems with the SATA drivers.   The Centos install stops when it gets to the point of loading the sata_vsc driver.  Then all that can be down is to power the machine down.   Any advice on getting one of these to run LInux would be greatly appreciated.   Thanks in advance, Gary

Eric BY · Answer

Dell doesn't have any support for any operating system other than Windows Storage Server on the 745. However the PE 750 has similar hardware, and is supported with RHEL 3.

http://www1.us.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/alliances/en/os_certifications?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz&~tab=3

MHarsch · Answer

WARNING! - What he said... Dell doesn't support installing Linux on the 745N   I have Fedora 3 running on a bunch of PowerVault 745Ns. It really didn't take much wrestling. Are you performing a network install? I can't really offer much advice, as I didn't really have many problems. I know Fedora 3 is a distro that worked 'out-of-the-box' for me, and had no problem loading sata_vsc. You can kick it off of a PXE server, or an ungodly long way would be to install off of media via a USB cdrom drive. What I did was take the cute little Flash drives that they sent along with each server and turned them into kickstart disks and booted off of those for NFS and FTP installs.   They really run well and they are an awesome way to fit 1.6TB of storage in 1U.   Matt

jenson2 · Answer

Just curious,Are you running any CERC controller card.You have the Linux Drivers for it.

algorithmics · Answer

Hi

We have Redhat Enterprise ES 3 running here on our PV 745n but the performance when reading or writing to the filesystems is dramatic.

If we get more than 5 MB/s locally we consider ourselves lucky - transferring data using the NIC degrades down to about 1.3 MB/s.

Did any of you test how fast you can transfer data on your installations or the overall performance of the PV 745 ?

If yes - please share - thanks,

Otto REIM

Algorithmics

algorithmics · Answer

Hi Eric   I ve just enabled write cache but the performance is still pitiful at best with about 70 MB per minute. We have had so many troubles already with this device that I am close to losing my last yota of energy going ahead.   Today I have tried updating the RAID-Controler Firmware and realised that I cannot get into DOS mode as the PV wont even boot from an USB-Diskdrive I attached ;((     Any help you can provide to find why the SATA-RAID Controller performs so badly would be very much appreciated ! If you need any further technical details please just post the questions and I ll fill in the answers asap !   Thanks in advance, Otto

Eric BY · Answer

Is caching enabled on your controller?  If not, you can turn it on, but unfortunately you will need to lay down your file system again, and ensure there is a battery backup connected to the server as well.

JMansford · Answer

We to had huge problems with performance on our 745n (Hardware raid).

I reconfigured the RAID-5 set to RAID10, this did mean I lost quite a lot of space but the performance is much better now. I think that the processor on the RAID card is simply not up to the job.

I think there is something fundamentally wrong with these boxes as even now we randomly get periods where the box doesn't respond for 2-3mins under load. This is my second NAS, the first was a 725n which was even worse!

PowerVault

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