Home / server / Questions / 189823
Accepted
Skyhawk
Asked: 2010-10-12 09:38:29 +0800 CST

JBOD SAS adapter for Solaris/Nexenta on Dell PowerEdge 2950?

  • 772

Given:

  1. One or more available Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers
  2. The desire to deploy ZFS iSCSI storage using Nexenta or Solaris
  3. ZFS uses software RAID
  4. Dell's PERC 5 RAID controllers do not support JBOD
  5. Presenting single-disk RAID 0 arrays in lieu of JBOD is not desirable

Question:

  1. I would like to replace the PERC with a SAS controller that is supported by Solaris and/or Nexenta. Do you have any personal recommendations?
  2. Would this be compatible with the existing backplane?
  3. What about external (MD1000) enclosures?
  4. Have you ever actually tried to do this with a Dell server? Do you have any other thoughts, recommendations, or bits of wisdom from personal experience?
solaris raid zfs dell-poweredge nexenta

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    In my experience, for ZFS LSI non-raid cards are the best. I use a Dell SAS6i (LSI 1068E rebadge) for internal drives and LSI SAS3801E (dual 3gbps 4x miniSAS ports) for external drives (MD1000) under Solaris 10 (s10u9) for ZFS at work, while I use the LSI SAS 9200-16e (quad 6gbps 4x miniSAS) at home with Nexenta (NCP3). Nothing but good things to say about LSI cards and support.

    • 4

  2. We use the LSI 1068 chipset HBA's such as LSI SAS 3081E-R with OpenSolaris. You can also find that chipset OEM'd by Intel and SuperMicro.

    We use these internally on our ASUS boxes w/o a backplane. It should work on a backplane, but we just have that feature.

    • 3

  3. Dell's SAS 6/ir 'budget raid' adapters do JBOD unless the drive is in a RAID array. The cards work relatively well from my experience although I cannot attest to whether they work with Nexenta or Solaris.

    See also this answer

    • 3

  4. Isn't there an option to set SCSI mode instead of RAID mode in the PE2950 BIOS? If so, that should do the trick for you.

    • 0