Using xserve raid with Linux

I have an Apple Xserve raid that I connected to a Dell PowerEdge 1950 using a QLogic Sanblade QLE2460 card. I currently have 7x750GB drives installed in the raid that yields around 4TB of usable capacity. I am running Red Hat 4 AS and created an ext3 file system. I have unfortunately had two occasions where the file system has gotten corrupted somehow. The file system seems fine until I shutdown cleanly and reboot. After booting, the partition table appears corrupt showing the file system is 4GB put the drive is much smaller. Is there a better file system type that is known to work with the xserve raid? Could this be a driver or kernel issue? Thanks!

Hello RandyMartin and welcome to the Apple boards,
I don't know how many people here are running your set-up, but hopefully someone will chime in with some ideas.
The general clearinghouse for all things Xserve RAID attached to non-Apple machines is: http://alienraid.org/
Good luck,
=Tod
G5/2.0x2, Dual XServes x2, XRAID, beige G3 501Mhz

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Clarification on how to use Xserve Raid and Fibre Channel without xsan.

First let me apologize for not responding earlier to your response, I tend to get busy and then forget to check back here.
Tod, the answer to your question is No, only one computer is accessing the xserve raid files at any one time and that is via Fibre Channel. However I do have the xserve raids set up as share points via ethernet.
Maybe I should turn that off and only access the files with the one computer that can connect via fibre channel.
I never thought of that. I will try that while I await for your answer, thanks again.
Todd Buhmiller
I have the following setup:
Xserve: 2x2Ghz Dual Core Intel Xeon, 5Gb of Ram, Running 10.5.8 Leopard Server
Xserve Raid with firmware version 1.5.1/1.51c on both controllers, and
Qlogic Sanbox 5600
Apple Fibre Channel Cards in Xserve, and Mac Pro Tower; Apple 2 Port 4Gbs Fibre Channel Card
Mac Pro Tower-Quad Core Intel Xeon 2.8Ghz, 16Gb of Ram, Running Snow Leopard 10.6.4
Here is the problem.
The directory for the xserve raids keep getting corrup, and I use disc warrior to rebuild them. Is there a way to keep the directories from getting corrupt? I am a few pieces of equipment before I can build an Xsan as that is the ultimate goal, but until then, I just need to be able to have the raids funciton as storage without having to rebuild the directories all of the time.
Anybody have any suggestions?
Thanks
Todd Buhmiller
Widescreen Media
Calgary, Alberta Canada
Tod Kuykendall
Posts: 1,237
From: San Diego
Registered: Oct 11, 2000
Re: Xserve Raid Mounts, Corrupt Directory tired of rebuilding directory
Posted: Jun 27, 2010 1:25 PM in response to: Todd Buhmiller
Are multiple computers accessing the same data on the RAID at the same time?
If so then NO. This is the source of your data corruption and I'm surprised if you were able to get all your data back every time if this is how you've been running your system. Each fibre channel assumes it has full and sole control of every volume it has mounted, no data arbitration is practiced and data corruption will occur if this assumption is wrong.
The only way this set-up will work is to use partitions or LUN masks so the volumes are accessed by one computer at any time. As long as one computer relinquishes control before another mounts it you will dodge arbitration issues but this is a dangerous game. If you screw up and mount an already mounted volume - and there is no easy way to tell if a volume is mounted - corruption will then occur. Sharing data simultaneous at fibre speeds is what XSAN does and to do this you need it.
HTH,
=Tod
Intel Xserve, G5 XServes, XRAID, Promise

+The xserve raids will mount automatically to any computer that I connect the qlogic fc switch to+
This is source of the corruption to your data. Any computer that attaches to a drive/partition via fibre channel assumes that it alone is in control of the drive and data corruption is inevitable.
+Is that the issue, should I disconnect the xserve from the fc switch and leave it connected via ethernet?+
Short answer: YES. The ethernet connections are fine because the server is controlling the file arbitration through the sharing protocol. Fibre channel connections assumes complete control over the partition and no arbitration of the file access is performed. It's like two people independently driving trying to drive the same car to different locations.
Depending on your set-up it is possible for the two machines to see and use different parts of the Xserve RAID storage but they cannot access the same areas without SAN doing the arbitration.
Hope that's clear,
=Tod

Xserve raid brocade switch, do I need xsan for multiple xserve raid with one gbic hba?

So I have 3 xserve raids. I would like to mount all 6 volumes on a single server with a 2 port hba. I have a brocade silkworm 3200, however the raid volumes will not mount. The only thing I can think of is do i need xsan to accomplish this? Initially I gathered it would be like additional resources on a normally data switch bu that does not seem to be the case.
Thanks in advance for any assistance.

No, you don't need XSAN for this. XSAN is for connecting one or more RAID units to more than one host. Since you only have one host, XSAN isn't an issue.
You may need to look more closely at the switch configuration. Mac OS X doesn't support multipath (at least last time I checked), so you'll need to make sure that you're either using just one link from the server, or that you've setup zoning in the switch so that each link from the server sees a subset of the RAID volumes (e.g. three RAID volumes mapped to each link to the server).
You may also need to check the RAID configurations to make sure you're not using LUN masking (a feature of earlier firmware versions).
One test here would be to connect the server directly to each RAID controller in turn and see if you see the appropriate volumes. The chances are you do, which points back to the switch configuration being the issue.

Using Xserve RAID as NAS

We have a serious need for a NAS system in our studio. And coincidentally, we have a 3 yr old XSERVE 5.6 TB RAID - just sitting around, unused.
The Xserve has the standard Fibre Channel ports for mounting it onto a your computer (as well as the Ethernet ports for admin).
My question is, has anyone used their XSERVE as NAS? I know I could hook-up a CPU to my xserve and make it work that way, but I don't have an extra G5 laying around.
Thanks,
Tom

Use some caution on the terminology here, as there are Xserve and Xserve RAID widgets, and these are quite different.
There needs to be a computer or controller here to act as a router between clients expecting to have Network Attached Storage (NAS) and a Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (FC SAN) widget such as the Xserve RAID.
There are controllers which allow SAN storage to be served via network, but these typically operate by providing a complete separate path (NAS) into the storage. Via iSCSI or AFP or SMB into the controller, for instance. (And I'd expect there isn't much in this product space for an Xserve RAID array; I am aware of a few vendors that do offer storage arrays that can be acquired with one or both of iSCSI and SAN bus interfaces, but Apple doesn't AFAIK offer this with Xserve RAID.)
I'd probably look to sell the Xserve RAID and (if you have it) the FC SAN Host Bus Adapter (HBA) you were using, and use any profits to offset the cost of acquiring a replacement NAS storage array widget, or to acquire a Direct Attached Storage (DAS) storage array that can be served off one of your existing host(s). A SCSI or SAS shelf hanging off FireWire 800 or a SAS controller can do quite well in this regard.
I'd tend to guess you'll spend more - if you don't already have a Mac Pro or Xserve and FC SAN giblets you can connect to the Xserve RAID - than wholesale replacement with a DAS or NAS widget. 5.6 TB is approximately three current-generation disks, or four of the previous 1.6 GB generation disks. A four- or eight-bay Drobo is in this range, as are many other solutions. Or "just a SCSI or SAS storage shelf" configured as DAS can work fine, too. (And disk storage shelves are available from various vendors.)

Xserve RAID, xfs, linux, and VERY slow deletes

Greetings,
We're running a linux box with kernel 2.6.22-2-amd64 on dual AMD Opteron Processors with 8G ram. We have two xserve raids mounted on this box: one with 4.1T (called gala) and another with 1.9T (called apple). We serve these disks to other boxen via nfs.
I have a series of large files (about 5G each) that I want to delete from the disk apple. I ssh to the machine to which the disks are attached (ie not via nfs). I change into the directory where the disk is mounted and sudo rm -rf *.gz. The first cpu on the box goes to 100% and it takes something like 15 minutes to delete EACH 5G file.
I've googled around but found no solution as to why this is hapening or what I can do about it.
The disk is mounted with no options:
/dev/sdd1 on /storage/disks/apple type xfs (rw)
Can someone help?
Thanks!

The depth of this directory is 1. That is:
dir$ ls -1
bigfile1.gz
bigfine2.gz
dir$
There are no subdirectories.
dir$ rm bigfile1.gz
takes about 10 minutes where bigfile1.gz is about 5GB in size.
I have not done the math to decide if the time is proportional to size because I wasn't sure how xfs deals with sparse files.
Thanks for any help anybody can provide.
Chad Matsalla

Xserve RAID with fibre switch and windows

I have a customer who potentially is looking at an Xserve and RAID using a fibre switch with a couple of G5s with fibre cards for speed. They also have a Windows machine that they need to access files, but speed is not an issue. Will the Windows machine be able to see the RAID if it is shared by OS X Server via ethernet or does it need a fibre card? Thanks in advance for assistance!
Mac OS X (10.4.3)

You can turn on Windows (SMB) sharing, or you can connect it directly via fibre channel. Note, if you connect it to the fibre, you can't have it access the SAME volume at the SAME time as the Macs are accessing (heck, you can't have the Macs access the SAME volume at the SAME time without software either), without Xsan and the StorNext file system.

How can I use Boot Camp with Linux?

How can I load Linux into Boot Camp on my iMac and Macbook Pro?

PBern80 wrote:
How can I load Linux into Boot Camp on my iMac and Macbook Pro?
Use a virtual machine like Fusion, Parallels, or VirtualBox to install Linux. You can not use Bootcamp.

XServe RAID on GenToo server?

Hello,
We are using multiple FC and SCSI RAID-subsystems at work and we need a bigger one by the end of the year.
By now we are using an Infortrend FC>FC RAID.
Regards
Nicolas

I know of many people using Xserve RAID on Linux, so it should work on Gentoo.
What kernel version will you be using? I do know of a number of cases previously where Xserve RAIDs didn't appear as LUNs to Linux, because Linux has this lame "feature" where a storage device must be explicitly listed in a kernel header file . If your kernel lists the storage, it will see the RAID, without issue. If it does NOT have the Xserve RAID lists, then the Xserve RAID will show up only if you do not use sparse LUNs. Basically meaning you shouldn't slice the volumes. Which could be an issue if your kernel version doesn't understand LUNs > 2 GB.
I've also seen some Linux versions which had poor performance with the RAID, again due to kernel tuning issues. 2.6 is a lot better than 2.4 was... but you should ensure you have a pretty recent build of the Linux kernel. With Gentoo, that shouldn't be much of an issue... just recompile world, lol.

Configure Xserve RAID as a single RAID 5 array?

We just picked up a used Xserve RAID with 14x750GB drives, and we want to configure the entire unit as a single RAID5 array. RAID Utility will let us configure each side as a separate array, but not both sides in a single array. Is this not possible or are we just missing something simple?

No, each side of the RAID is logically separate so while you can create a RAID 5 on either side there is no way to create a single RAID5 of the unit. You can create a RAID 50 and make the 2 RAID5s into a single volume software RAID 0 by using Disk Utility to join the two 5s into a single volume but that's as close as it comes.
HTH,
=Tod

Which 750GB drives used in an XServe RAID?

Could somebody with an XServe RAID with 750GB drives please tell me, which drives are used in this configuration? You can look it up in the XServe RAID admin utility, under Arrays and Drives when selecting a drive in "drive" mode.
Thanks a lot,
Floh

ST3750640 NA P
Revision 3.BTF
it is a seagate

What to do with our Xserve RAID, moving forward - Need Advice.

We have an 3.5 TB Xserve RAID (14 drives - 250 GB each, split into two 7-drive volumes). As many others have, we've moved into more HD and tapeless workflow. The Xserver RAID was purchased really for one HD project with DVCPRO HD back in 2004 and hasn't really been used since except for backup storage.
I'd really like to move us into a SAN system, but am curious about others' perspectives on populating our Xserve RAID with 1 TB or greater drives now or get a different RAID setup. We've moved to Mac Pros, but the Xserve RAID is still dedicated to just one G5. I am doing some reading on setups such as the EVO and CalDigit, but haven't setup a SAN. It's time though.
We have three post machines - two editorial and one sound station. I could really use some insight on how to use our setup in a SAN scenario or what's the cheapest way we can get into a SAN workflow. Granted, drives are cheap these days, but it's so inefficient copying data between two machines to make sure we have a copy of the same media.
Thanks for any input folks.

+I'd really like to move us into a SAN system, but am curious about others' perspectives on populating our Xserve RAID with 1 TB or greater drives now or get a different RAID setup.+
I'll start with the fact that 750GB are the absolute max you'll be able to put into the Xserve RAID. Compatible 750 PATAs are really hard to find (and are expensive when you can find them) so that avenue makes little sense. I think you should really be thinking in terms of new hardware at this point. I know several people who run XSAN and are much happier with the Promise RAIDs they have now over the older Xserve RAIDs.
Which hardware and SAN software you should be looking at I'll leave up to someone with more modern experience in the video editing realm- I've been out of it for too many years now.
My $.02,
=Tod

Xserve RAID lost RAID 5 array on right/bottom controller

I cleanly shut down an Xserve G5 with an Xserve RAID attached and then powered off the Xserve RAID this morning. I replaced a failing memory module in the Xserve and moved the rack 6". I then powered on the Xserve RAID, waited for a couple minutes until it was fully booted, and then booted the Xserve. When it came up, my RAID 50 volume failed to mount. Upon further investigation, it appears that the RAID 5 array on the right hand disks is "gone". In RAID Admin (Disks and Drives tab), the left side array is visible, but all disks on the right side list status as "OK" and Type: as "Spare".
Configuration: Xserve RAID with 14 250 GB disks. Each side was configured with 6 disks in a RAID 5 array and one spare. These were striped using Software RAID on the Xserve into RAID 50 and mounted as a single volume. The RAID firmware is currently 1.5 and the Xserve is running OS X Server 10.4.3.
To summarize today's activities: under Apple's guidance (as this entire system is covered under a Premium Support contract), I swapped the (bottom) controller for the right side, updated firmware (from v1.3/1.20a to 1.5/1.50), multiple resets of both controllers, repeated forced firmware updates, etc.
Also, I swapped the left set of disks for the right set, and the array from the left set now shows up on the right side, and the missing array from the right is still missing with the disks on the left side. I replaced the disks to their original positions with the same results.
RAID Admin's Utility "Recognize Array" will not perform any operations on the rigth side disks and Apple tells me that there's nothing further that I can do with it.
None of this has solved the problem or substantially changed the issue, and the disks on the right side are still missing their associated array. Apple is unable/unwilling to offer any further help except to refer me to 3rd party data recovery services.
Does anyone have any suggestion at all that might possibly recover the missing array? Is anyone aware of any tools that I might use to recreate the RAID 5 array on the right controller? I was hoping that there might exist some low-level tools with which the disks could be recreated into an array by hand? Are there any commercial products that would work on this? Any other ideas?
Many thanks for any suggestions.
- Martin
Xserve RAID (14 250GB disks) on Xserve G5 Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Not sure why you swapped the controllers back and forth
William, I don't think I was clear on this. I swapped the controller with a new controller that I had in a spare parts kit. This was at Apple's request.
really, RAID is not a backup...
I'm well aware, but despite my incessant warnings, users will become lulled in to a false sense of security when something "just works" for a very long time. This array wasn't intended to store valuable data that couldn't be lost, but...
It may be possible for Apple to re-create the RAID set, did you ask AppleCare about the possibility?
Apple has told me more than once that there's nothing else that they can do for me...and yet I keep calling back.
I was surprised that this array was lost when there were absolutely no prior signs of a problem and the system was merely shutdown and restarted cleanly. I'm more surprised and quite disappointed to learn that Apple will do nothing else for me (under a Premium Support contract) to attempt to repair a damaged array. When I asked questions about where the RAID information is stored, I received the answers: "I can't tell you that" and "Apple doesn't release that information". I did not get the feeling that they were working with me, but rather holding my hand while they walked me through published documentation.
I expected that there would be utilities (analagous to filesystem repair utilities) such as RAID Admin's "Recognize Array" that could help repair and recover damaged array data. I think that the lesson that I've leanred today is that I was naive to have expected such a thing without actually having investigated it ahead of time.
Anyway, thanks for your input, William.

XSERV RAID FIBER CHANNEl

We have XSERV RAID MODEL A1009 with 4 Hard disk RAID 5.
Now I have installed CISCO 1000Base SX Module in 3 COM Switch & other same Module in XSERVER RAID. Now XSERVE RAID & switcted with Transeiver cable. Now I check RAID ADMIN TOOL FIber Channel Option the links shows down.
Let me know what is solution. Please also let me know how can I know that fiber link is up if any way.

Finisar makes a nice SFP to LC transceiver (available on the Apple Store for $99.95 for 2 Gbit and $119.95 for 4 Gbit) that you can use in the Xserve to allow it to accept LC optical cables. You'll need 2 of these, and then you can hook up LC optical cables.
I'll echo the other post -- be aware those ports are for fibre channel communication ONLY. You must hook it to a fibre channel card (HBA) in a host, or to a fibre switch (i.e. Cisco MDX 9000 series). You cannot hook up a network connection to those ports -- Xserve RAID provides data ONLY over fibre channel, it is not a NAS device. You must connect it to a host which can re-share the data over Ethernet, for example Xserve RAID with OS X Server which can reshare using AFP, SMB/CIFS, NFS, FTP, DAV, and more.

Iozone website benchmark results on Xserve RAID

Hi,
I'd like to try and find out how the Apple RAID was configured for the
iozone benchmark. The results of the benchmark are here:
http://www.iozone.org/src/current/Xserver.xls
I asked the question directly to iozone and the answer was that the
benchmark was run in the Apple booth at some tradeshow/conference.
The booth guys let the iozone guys run the benchmark there.
The write results in the iozone benchmark are about 2.5 times better than
the write results we are getting so I'd like to try and figure out how it was
configured.
I'm going to be using the Apple RAID in an intensive write database
application running MySQL. Here's some info on my setup:
My system is a Sun v40 4xOpteron with 8Gig of RAM. I'm running
Solaris 10 release 03/05.
The apple RAID has all 14 disks and is fibre connected. The disks
are setup so that the mirroring is done in the Apple RAID. This produces
a bunch of LUNs. These are all striped together at the OS level, so
the setup is RAID 10. Note that this version of the OS only supports
a LUN size of 2TB max.
Thanks for any help,
Mike
Mac OS X (10.4.6) Xserve RAID

The last tab in the spreadsheet tells you how the RAID was configured, namely RAID 5 128 stripes.
From what I recall when I ran iozone against one of my XServe RAIDs, their figures came out a little higher than mine, but not dramatically. I'll see if I can find the data dumps for comparison.
In the meantime I would look at how you're configuring the RAID. publishing a series of mirrors and using striping at the host level seems less-than-ideal. You're forcing the XServe RAID to write the data twice on each controller, as well as requiring the OS to manage which LUNs it's writing to.
(remember, RAID 1 write performance is lower than other RAID levels)
You would be better off running either RAID 0+1 (striping on the XServe RAID with each side mirrored by the server), or RAID 5, leaving everything up to the XServe RAID - the XServe RAID's performance at RAID 5 is not significantly lower than RAID 0 and it eliminates any overhead on the server side.
If it wasn't for the volume size limitation in Solaris I would recommend RAID 50 over 10 (RAID 5 on the XServe RAID, striped on the host) but that would likely exceed the 2TB volume limit.
Other things to check are the write caches on the drive (use only if you're in a stable power environment).

How to low-format disks in XServer RAID

I am new to the macworld and have been assigned a mission to low-format 2 XServer RAID with 28x400Gb Hitachi Deskstar disks. I need to low-format it because the customer is about to sell the servers, and are therefore obliged by law/or insurancecompany to make sure that no data can be restored.
I have tried to extract the disks and run them in a PC with a software called KillDisks, which writes zeros to the disk 10-fold times. However the PC will not accept the disk, im getting errors that states that no sectors can be read. Also, in BIOS the disk are supposedly 126 Gb...when in fact its capacity is 400 Gb.
Sounds like the Apple firmware is not compatible.
So, my question is...can I perform this task from inside the XServer, via some webinterface or perhaps the remote adminapplication?

I see you point but I mostly meant the need to extract/take apart the drives.
The job was to make the data (reasonably) "unrecoverable"?
(The KillDrive application can maybe even "destroy" drives for Xserve RAID use?)
Maybe not relevant here but the Xserve RAID woun't "buy"/just work with "any" drive/firmware.
He shouldn't even have to "reformat" raid-sets as you can write zeroes to each whole raid-set volume from the Disk Utility using the "security option" (will take a lot of time though - but probably much less time than doing it for each drive individually - if JBOD or otherwise).
Maybe even possibly started from OS X install DVD (if servers are "wiped"). Don't know if FC drivers are present on the DVD, but think they are.
(Also a "Mirror Door" G4 or Xserve G4 can probably "format" (really initialize) these drives and can at least hold up to 4 drives at a time.)
And you can manage (but not erase drives/volumes on) the Xserve RAID from any computer (if you know the IP) using the Java RAID_Admin.jar file that is "extractable" from The OS X version file (.app) "package". And it can be run on (most?) OSes that can run Java. Certainly from Windows with Java installed.
And you don't buy a couple of old preowned used Xserve RAIDs and spend a huge amount to restore data if you don't think/know it's REALLY worth the while.

Using xserve raid with Linux

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