Questions[xserve](server)

I'm trying to install linux on a apple xserve 3,1 which comes with some strange raid controller that does not get detected by linux. lspci is telling me:

01:00.0 RAID bus controller: Apple Computer Inc. Device 008a (rev c8)

I am assuming that this is a qlogic raid controller, but none of the qlogic drivers work.

The only other output that I get on the command line that might be related to this controller is:

pci 0000:01:00.0: vpd r/w failed. This is likely a firmware bug on this device. Contact the card vendor for a firmware upgdate.

any hints on how to talk to this thing are welcome!

EDIT: I also tried to get vmware on this running, since the HCL states that xserve 3,1 is supported (http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/detail.php?deviceCategory=server&productid=20234), however, the vmware installer doesn't see any hard drives either. This seems to be a known problem http://communities.vmware.com/message/1901726, http://communities.vmware.com/message/1817235

Pretty much the title: it possible to use a modern, 2.5″ SSD in an Apple Drive Module on a early 2008 Xserve? This would be replacing a 15k RPM SAS drive, and in most places I've looked that HDD is almost as expensive than a similarly sized SSD.

I'm in the process of moving files from an Ubuntu server to a Snow Leopard server. The Ubuntu server has an NFS share of around 6TB which I'd like to clone to the Snow Leopard server.

I mounted the nfs share on the Snow Leopard server and then ran

rsync -av /Volumes/FromUbuntu /Volumes/LocalCopy

After it copies around 100GB it complains that files have vanished. I'm assuming that for some reason the NFS links are going stale? What could be causing this? The Ubuntu server is not crashing and there are not connectivity issues that I am aware of. I wouldn't mind running to the rsync command over and over until the copy was finished, but it takes about 6 hours just for rsync to make it's file list.

Any suggestions? Would it be faster to just rsync over SSH? Thanks!

(PS: I've tried just using 'cp -arv' which doesn't seem to fail but according to the network traffic monitor on the Mac it seems to take twice as long to copy files as rsync after rsync has built its file list?)

UPDATE: I'm trying rsync over ssh from the mac server to the ubuntu server and it seems to been going much faster (it took less than two hours to create a file list and start transferring, where as when rsyncing from the nfs mount took around six hours just to build the initial file list.) It definitely looks like there is some problem with mounting the NFS share on the mac. Has anyone had problems with this? What about the other way around, mounting nfs shares on the mac on an ubuntu client? I was planning on hosting an NFS share for Ubuntu clients on the Mac, but now I'm getting nervous. Thanks for your input!

I'm running three virtual servers on a single physical server (using Parallels Bare Metal for virtualization and one Xserve is the physical server).

I'm wondering how the traffic travels between the virtual servers, does it go through some kind of an internal mechanism so the traffic never leaves the physical server or does it go through the router and back into the physical server?

Thanks so much for any help.

Apple's Boot Camp allows you to run a Windows client OS on Apple hardware. Has anyone had success in running a Windows Server OS natively on Apple's Xserve hardware?

Does anyone know if Boot Camp updates coming in Snow Leopard will support this?