RAID Controller/Manageability

We are planning to buy 2 new servers and installing Open-E in a cluster scenario to support a Hyper-V R2 cluster.

I am trying to decide which RAID controller to buy (probably under $600). I am hoping that we can get e-mail alerts when drives fail, but I am confused about what is required for that to happen.

We are considering RAID controller LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-4i, primarily because Open-E seems to provide lots of support for it. Would this controller allow us to get e-mail alerts when a drive fails, or when the RAID controller battery is low? How about other controllers on the HCL, such as HP P410?

Thanks,
Dave

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Dave,

we're using Areca controllers, which for the larger models (you didn't say how many drives you're going to attach) have an extra Ethernet port for out-of-band RAID management including SMTP notifications and SNMP. An on-the-box agent for the cards is included in the DSS package, which is capable of SMTP notifications, too. Haven't tried that with DSS, though. (I've been using that on the box agent with other Linux installations without problems).

Regards,
Jens

do consider Adaptec's "Zero maintenance" series.....I got a pair of 5805Z.

Not an answer to your question, but be careful, DSS v6 failover cluster has issues with Hyper-V failover cluster yet (BSOD of VMs when doing iSCSI failover on DSS). At the moment you must put your VMs to saved state before you can failover on DSS. I hope open-e is working on that problem ...

BTW: We use also Areca controller which works well with DSS.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by pfeifferl

Not an answer to your question, but be careful, DSS v6 failover cluster has issues with Hyper-V failover cluster yet (BSOD of VMs when doing iSCSI failover on DSS). At the moment you must put your VMs to saved state before you can failover on DSS. I hope open-e is working on that problem ...

BTW: We use also Areca controller which works well with DSS.

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pfeifferl, you meant if the primary DSS is turned off, all the VMs will go into BSOD when the secondary DSS is taking over the job?

During the failover/failback there is a short outage in iSCSI connection. There are lots of error events in Windows event log (e.g. "Initiator failed to connect to the target." ...) on cluster nodes and the cluster disks are going offline and online again. Only a few seconds, but the VMs running on cluster (with CSV) are crashing a few seconds after that occures.

I've opened a trouble ticket at open-e support, but no answer yet ...

So my workaround is to save the VMs, doing the DSS failover and start the VMs again. It's bad for a HA scenario, but the only way at the moment ...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by pfeifferl

During the failover/failback there is a short outage in iSCSI connection. There are lots of error events in Windows event log (e.g. "Initiator failed to connect to the target." ...) on cluster nodes and the cluster disks are going offline and online again. Only a few seconds, but the VMs running on cluster (with CSV) are crashing a few seconds after that occures.

I've opened a trouble ticket at open-e support, but no answer yet ...

So my workaround is to save the VMs, doing the DSS failover and start the VMs again. It's bad for a HA scenario, but the only way at the moment ...

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You're using Supermicro + Areca, not sure if it's related, but mine is Dell R710 + Adaptec 5805Z. I will try out the fail over sometime and let you know if it would also crash all the VMs due to lost in iSCSI connection. I will need sometime....

What you mentioned is not a workaround.....if your primary DSS fail, that's it. Are you running any SCOM + SCVMM to auto reboot all the VM when the secondary DSS takes over successfully?

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Originally Posted by moral

New 9500S RAID controller builds on manageability, performance ... Feature; InfoWorld's 2010 Technology of the Year Awards. The InfoWorld Test Center picks the year's best

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