Friday, October 13, 2006

Problems with New HP Proliant Servers and Debian Sarge

Recently, HP announced that it will be fully supporting Debian Sarge on its servers (http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6104891.html) This is great news for the Debian community, of course, because a huge vendor stand behind it leads to some wonderful perks. For those of us that would like to advocate Debian solutions, support here really goes a long way.

Well, that's all good in theory, but I have to relate my recent real world experience here. We planned on rolling out a new website on 4 new HP Proliant DL320 servers with SATA hardware RAID. This seemed like an excellent platform, until we actually started installing the latest and greatest copy of Debian 3.1 (Sarge) on it. We ran into several problems.

1. The RAID containers were not recognized.


We could not get the system to install properly at all using the stock kernel here. Once we managed to grab the latest kernel, we were able to install successfully. Once we had a running system, however, we realized that the RAID containers were not recognized at all, and the driver in use was actually operating on the on board RAID card as if it were just a SCSI host bus adapter. Writes to one disk were not mirrored... not good!

A quick call to HP Linux support got us a very friendly and knowledgeable technician. Unfortunately, he told us flat out that the hardware was not supported yet! They were working furiously to get drivers ready for download, and that we'd probably be looking at December 2006 for the office support from HP. He told us that the announcement took the support folks by surprise and they were not really in a good place to support all of the Proliant hardware as promised.

2. USB bus would not initialize properly.

We were left with a hung system during reboot as it attempted to load the USB modules. Having purchased the HP remote management cards, and discovering that we are unable to use USB under Linux, we were left with no choice but to disable the hardware and USB support for these boxes. This effectively made our management cards useless. Our only option here was to basically wait out HP support or go with a 3rd party fix that the HP Linux support tech quietly managed to tell us about.

So, HP left us in a tough spot here with these machines. I have to say that their support team was extremely helpful and knowledgeable throughout the process. I could definitely sense their frustration, though, at the premature announcement. Hopefully, their software folks can get some stable drivers cranked out soon so they can make good on the promise of Linux support for the Proliant series.

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