Intel Xserve and kernel panic on high I/O load

Question

Hi everyone,
Having added our 1st Intel Xserve to our server farm for test purposes we have encoutered several kernel panics on high I/O loads to Xsan volumes and standalone Xraid's.
Below is a portion of the system.log after restart.
The amusing part of this is that the crash reporter that suposed to log the reason for the crash crashed itself.
I was trying to use the new Xserve as a backup server but even with about 20% load on all 4 processors it will panic and restart.
Verdict: absolutley unreliable and useless if you need your Xserve to shuffle a lot of data around. The kernel drivers for the Apple FC card has also been changed which caused problems with our Archiware Presstore backup software.(kernel panic)
Looks like Apple is tampering with the multi core kernel of 10.4.8 on the Intel Xenon Processors at the moment and hasn't got it right yet. Well, we got one revision left to get this fixed before 10.5 comes out and that's still miles away from being usuable to say the least.
Thank you Apple, for selling your latest products that don't work as usual.
Any comments of similar experiences are welcome.
Dec 15 11:33:24 stansted /System/Library/CoreServices/Crash Reporter.app/Contents/MacOS/Crash Reporter: FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "¨”^X^F¨”^X^F".
Dec 15 11:33:24 stansted /System/Library/CoreServices/Crash Reporter.app/Contents/MacOS/Crash Reporter: kCGErrorInvalidConnection : CGSGetNextEventRecord: Invalid connection
Dec 15 11:33:24 stansted /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow: Login Window Application Started
Dec 15 11:33:25 stansted crashdump[508]: Crash Reporter crashed
Dec 15 11:33:25 stansted loginwindow[507]: Login Window Started Security Agent
Dec 15 11:33:25 stansted crashdump[508]: crash report written to: /Users/serveradmin/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/Crash Reporter.crash.log
Dec 15 11:33:29 stansted ARDAgent [521]: ******ARDAgent Launched******

Answer 1

While I have found a few problems as well, I have gotten the intel xserve fairly stable (it did take a while and a lot of apple support calling)
I haven't had kernal panics, but I haven't been able to get the processors above 45% when doing compression. Also, I had some nasty lun masking problems with the fibre card which did result in corrpution of a HFS raid volume.
On the topic of xsan and the intel xserve, it is a BAD idea to try to install anything prior to 1.4.0. Had hangs, crashes and even corruption of the serial licensing daemon. Installing 1.4 and upgrading to 1.4.1 was a huge fix to those issues.
Overall, after a lot of work, it is working well, and does play back 100MB/s video extremely well off an xsan volume. Although, I would be fully content if I could get compressor's utilization of the CPU from 40 to 100%.