PV 660F + 224F JBOD questions

Question

Hi, I recently purchased a full Dell San Environtment (660F, 224F, 51F + Qlogic 2200 cards) I finally got everything working in terms of everything speaking with the arrays and the ability to mount drives and do zoning (newbie at this). My question was can the 660F or 224F do JBOD? I would like each server to be able to mount 1 drive that is maid up of 3-4 drives in the array. I can do this with software raid in linux however would be much more convienient if i could do it above the OS level. Any information / thoughts are welcome. Thanks

Eric BY · Answer

The 660 can do JBOD, but it is tricky to configure it using Linux. Dell never validated Linux with the PV660, so there is no way to configure the 660 from within Linux.

What you can do is configure the 660 in Windows the way you want. Then attach the 660 to your Linux host, and use the disks. Make sure your load order in your /etc/modules.conf file is correct. HBA module should load last in your scsi_hostadapter entries.

The 660 is an active / active solution, so you can use the /etc/raidtab with the multipath raid level to configure failover.

Keep in mind that none of this is supported by Dell, so good luck!

amentges · Answer

Thanks for the reply erik, maybe you will know this one to, currently when i reboot my machine sda gets taken by the san and my local hard disk becomes sdb

"(root)>df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb2             32890776    676780 30543236   3% /
/dev/sdb1               101086      8120     87747   9% /boot

"

Yet my modules config file does have the qla listed second

(root)>cat /etc/modprobe.conf
alias eth0 e1000
alias eth1 e1000
alias scsi_hostadapter aic7xxx
alias scsi_hostadapter1 qla2200
alias usb-controller ohci-hcd

Any ideas?

PowerVault

PV 660F + 224F JBOD questions

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