Linux and HW raid - an administrators summary

For RAID to be useful in an enterprise environment, one needs to get a warning when a disk fails, and be able to replace this disk without having to reboot. This page is a summary of the status of some (most/all) hw raid drivers supported by the default linux kernel. The following criteria is being considered:

Summary of all known drivers

Driver name

Supported

Status

Cmd tool

GUI tool

Debian-installer

3w-xxxx

Yes

No

Yes*

Yes

Yes

3w-9xxx

Yes

No

Yes*

Yes

Yes

aacraid

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

arcmsr

Yes*

No*

Yes*

**

Yes*

cciss

Yes

Yes

?

?

Yes

DAC960

Yes

Yes

?

?

Yes

dpt_i2o

Yes

?

Yes

?

?

gdth

Yes

Yes

No*

?

Yes

ips

Yes

No*

No*

No*

Yes

megaraid

Yes

?

?

?

?

megaraid_mbox

Yes

?

?

?

?

megaraid_sas

Yes

?

?

?

?

megaraid2

Yes

Yes

?

?

No

mptsas

Yes

Yes

Yes

?

?

mptscsih

Yes

?

Yes

?

?

Details about individual drivers

3w-xxxx

Hardware using this driver: 3ware 8xxx controllers and earlier ones

There is a CLI from 3Ware which supports all functions of the card, tw_cli. There is a web-based GUI tool named 3dm2 available as .deb package from http://jonas.genannt.name/

3w-9xxx

Hardware using this driver: 3Ware 9xxx as 9500s and newer as 9690SA-8I, 9650SE

There is a CLI from 3Ware which supports all functions of the card, tw_cli.

There is s GUI tool accessible via browser named 3dm2 used for management and monitoring daemon that configures the RAID, monitors the disk status, sends mail on failure and is accessible by web browser. It also manages older 3w-xxxx devices. Both 3dm2 and tw_cli are available as a .deb package from http://jonas.genannt.name/

aacraid

Adaptec and Dell used to provide afacli tool for manipulating raid sets, however it is no longer supporting the current AACRAID controllers. Also, afacli requires libraries that are no longer available in Debian distributions. At the end of aacraid section is the old information on tools available on DELL website, which may be useful for older distributions and controllers.

Current software for managing AAC arrays is available at Adaptec website: http://www.adaptec.com/en-us/downloads/storage_manager/sm/productid=aar-2820sa&dn=adaptec+serial+ata+ii+raid+2820sa.html, latest version is Adaptec Storage Manager v5.20.17414 for Linux (available also in 64bit version).

This RPM archive includes both arcconf binary, as well as Storage Manager - GUI tool, using SUN Java (binaries are included in RPM)

After installing the package, following actions are required:

Note: arcconf requires libstdc++.so.5 library, available in libstdc++5 debian package.

Below is the info on the old afacli tool

Dell also provides some admin tools in binary form. See http://linux.dell.com/storage.shtml#aacraid, under the Management Utility heading.

Hardware using this driver: Dell ?PowerEdge 2650, Adaptec SCSI RAIDs 2200S, 2120S, SATA RAID 2810SA, Perc 3/Di controllers, ...

NB: I had some problems with Adaptec 2810SA. Debian kernel freezes (rejected IO to offline devices) in case array becomes downgraded (ie one disk failed). I had to patch kernel with adaptec driver, and kernel stops freezing with one drive fail -- AlexanderVlasov

arcmsr

Areca is a fairly new player on the SATA Hardware Raid market, but they offer unprecedented features and have excellent driver support for Linux. Their hardware supports raid-6 in addition to the other levels, and online expansion + migration as well. The driver is in the main kernel as of 2.6.19, but debian supports it since etch (2.6.18) They have, amongst others, an 'archttp' module which enables a webinterface(!) to the card which offers full functionality. Archttp is statically linked so it will run in virtually all circumstances. Since it offers both a wide range of monitoring and maintenance functions, archttp + a webbrowser is all you'll ever need, and it fullfills, IMHO, the functions of CLI, GUI and proc entry all in one. (Well, you really have to see it.) Beware: archttp tries to use /dev/ttyS0, so if you use it in any other way you should take care about this issue. See http://zulu.in.ua/areca-raid-management-utils/ru/ (sorry, russian language only) CLI tool (statically linked i386 and amd64 binaries) also can be downloaded from ftp site. Vendor support page: http://www.areca.com.tw/support/main.htm

Hardware using this driver: All ARECA SATA controllers

* The new ARC-18xx series is NOT supported by the old driver included in the Kernel, only the ARC11xx/12xx/13xx/16xx will work ** Most of their series have an out-of-band management with build in Webserver, no need for installing any software to manage controllers/arrays

cciss

The source for a daemon detecting status changes and reporting it to syslog and as SNMP traps is available and packaged for debian as cpqarrayd. Some information is available in /proc/driver/cciss/cciss0. There is a tool array-info available to extract the RAID status for cciss devices.

More tools can be found at http://cciss.sourceforge.net/#cciss_utils, including cciss_vol_status which will report RAID status for cciss devices.

Hardware using this driver: Various servers from Compaq/HP, HP ?ProLiant DL380 G5

DAC960

Hardware using this driver: Mylex AcceleRAID 352/170/160

Status info is available in /proc/rd/status. Dont use this with 2.4 kernels on machines with more than 1GB, as the driver has some problems accessing memory above 1GB

dpt_i2o

The source for some command line utils are available at http://i2o.shadowconnect.com/download.php, and packaged for debian as raidutils.

Hardware using this driver: Adaptec SCSI RAIDs 2000S, 2100S, IDE RAID 2400A

gdth

Status info is available in /proc/scsi/gdth/0. Some tools and drivers are available from the vendor. Some linux tools are available on a CD included with the controller. Debian packages storcon and srcd are hidden in ir1_linux_utils_2.12.zip downloadable from Intel Download service (2.16, i386) or ICP Vortex site (2.17, i386 & amd64)

Hardware using this driver: ICP Vortex GDT6118RD, Intel RAID Controller SRCZCR, Intel SATA RAID Controller SRCS14L

ips

Info on BIOS-version and RAID configuration is available from /proc/scsi/ips/0. This file do(es?) not contain the RAID status. There is a precompiled command line tool ipssend available from the vendor CD. It can be used to get information on the RAID status, and also be used to configure and administrate the raid. There is also a graphical raid tool ?RaidMan available in RPM format from the vendor CD. The command line tool is also available from Linux-HA. (uri wrong)

Better is to use ibm's dumplog archive : http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/docdisplay?lndocid=MIGR-4UD223&brandind=5000008

Hardware using this driver: IBM Netfinity 5500, IBM Netfinity 5600, IBM eserver xSeries 226, IBM eserver xSeries 345.

megaraid

Status info is supposed to be available in /proc/megaraid/*/raiddrives-*. This was not the case on at least one Dell ?PowerEdge 2550 machine. Some tools and drivers are available from the vendor.

Hardware using this driver:

megaraid_mbox + megaraid_mm

Hardware using this driver: Intel SATA-RAID controllers

Note: To use the Intel SRCS28X controller with more than 4GB of system RAM you need ad least firmware revision 814B.

megaraid_sas

Hardware using this driver: Dell ?PowerEdge 2900, Dell ?PowerEdge 2950, Dell ?PowerEdge M600, Dell ?PowerEdge R510.

There's a binary-only CLI tool MegaCli available for download from the LSI website. The zipfile contains a 32bit RPM package containing the 32bit and 64bit ("MegaCli64") binary. There is also a megasasctl tool to get RAID status available from the megactl package on Sourceforge. There are Debian packages available for both these tools from http://hwraid.le-vert.net/wiki/DebianPackages .

megaraid2

RAID-status is available from /proc/megaraid/*/raiddrives-* and disk-status from /proc/megaraid/*/diskdrives-ch*.

I had to rebuild initrd.img to get the megaraid2 driver on the ramdisk. The procedure I used was:

echo megaraid2>>/etc/mkinitrd/modules
mkinitrd -o /boot/initrd.img-megaraid2

Then I rebooted, and made sure that grub used the new initrd.img-megaraid2

Hardware using this driver: Dell PowerEdge 2850 megaraid_mbox [linux 2.6.9] Not aware of any method of detecting the RAID status for this RAID.

Hardware using this driver: Dell PowerEdge 2450, Dell PowerEdge 2850

mptsas

RAID status can be obtained via the mpt-status tool.

Hardware using this driver: Dell ?PowerEdge 860.

mptscsih

RAID status is available using a the free mpt-status tool.

Hardware using this driver: Sun v20Z, IBM eServer 325/326.


CategoryHardware