Xsan with Raid and Xserve combined

Hi all,
I am setting up my first xsan and wonder if I can do the following with my kit.
Xserve with 3 x 1.5TB caddies (with Apple raid card in Raid 5)
Xserve with 3 x SAS 15k 300GB
Apple Raid with 7.5TB
Basically I want to use the Xserve with 4TB as the MDC but would love to be able to add the 4TB raid to the xsan so I have 11.5TB storage, is it possible to mix and match HD volumes on diff systems into the xsan??
If possible as well it would be great to add the SAS raid in as well for a super fast scratch area.
Any comments would be grand.

Nope. The Xsan volume must reside on storage that all the machines can see over Fibre Channel (SCSI protocol). You can't use storage internal to the servers themselves as part of the SAN volume.

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Anyone else having problem with RAID and iTunes syncing photos in Vista?

Hello,
For whatever reason iTunes can not load some of the photos from C drive. It can do it from D drive, though VERY slow. Both C and D are NTFS system, but C is a RAID 0 drive (implemented by hardware on motherboard, Intel 82801G controller). I just wander if this is something related to iTunes not working correctly with RAID drivers, or is it something else? I should say that ALL other programs and games working fine on this drive.
Thanks for the replies.

The problem is with Windows Vista using the NTFS file system, check out this post for the official solution. This has worked perfectly for me everytime I've tried it:
http://i.nconspicuo.us/2007/10/28/syncing-photos-to-iphone-with-windows-vista-us ing-itunes-sync-pictures-solution/

Problems with RAID and a Flash USB Drive

I'm attempting to install on a RAID 1 array using just one usb flash drive. Yes, just one. I'm trying out the idea's in this thread: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=64281
Partitioning scheme:
sdb1 -> boot partition
sdb2 -> swap
sdb3 -> raid 1 array -> root
I set the partitiions to type 0xfd (linux raid autodetect) in fdisk (probably not necessary) and created the array with:
mdadm -C /dev/md0 -n 2 -l -b internal missing -W --write-behind /dev/sdb3
I then installed like normal, specifying that I needed usb and raid hooks in mkinitcpio.conf
I added "md=0,/dev/sdb3" as a kernel option in grub's menu.lst, specifying that the md driver should assemble /dev/md0 (my root partition) out of /dev/sdb3 before trying to mount it.
This process was succesful using a partition on my hard drive.
However, using a usb drive causes a kernel panic during boot when trying to mount /dev/md0.
Looking at the messages reveals that before my usb drive was detected, md attempted to create the array, unsuccessfully, as /dev/sdb didn't exist yet. "md: unkown device name /dev/sdb3" or something to that effect.
In mkinitcpio.conf, the usb hook comes before the raid hook, so this shouldn't be happening, should it?

I think rootdelay will not work in that special case, rootdelay makes the system to wait after all the hooks are executed, and you need to wait before executing the raid hook.
I don't know if there is an easy way for that, but one solution is to modify the raid hook to wait for /dev/sdb3 to be created :
- edit /lib/initcpio/hooks/raid, add this before the /bin/mdassemble command :
until [ -e /dev/sdb3 ] ;
do
sleep 1 ;
done
- rebuild your boot images with mkinitcpio (you'll need to chroot to your system)
that should work
PS: someone correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I know, the usb hook does not create your /dev/sdb (if you edit the usb hook, you'll see that it only set rootdelay if it is not yet set). it is the udev daemon, which is launched in the background by the udev hook, and the udev daemon is quite long to create USB device nodes.

Boot Priority with Raid and Single Drives.

I thought I would share something that I discovered yesterday after struggling to get a Sata Raid array to play nicely with a single sata drive.
Sorry if this is already widely known but I couldn’t find any reference to it.
Setup:
MSI K8N Platinum SLI
2x 160GB Maxtor DM10 Raid0 Array (Windows)
1x 160GB Maxtor DM10 Single Drive (Backup)
The main issue I was having was no matter how I setup the array and what I set as the first boot device windows would always try to boot from the single drive.
The array was set to bootable when it was created, and it set to be the first device under the hard disk boot priority sub menu.
If I tried installing windows with the single drive plugged it would always be seen as C: drive and would copy the boot files here even if I selected D: (array) as install location.
If I tried unplugging the single drive and installing windows, it install and boot correctly from the array.
But as soon as I plugged the single drive back in windows would look for the boot files on it and tell me there was an error and no boot files could be found.
When looking through the bios I noticed a setting called “Extended IDE Drive”, this makes the drive appear as an IDE drive so that there is no need to install the sata driver F6 on install.
Once I set this to No/None the drive disappeared from the bios but after a reboot windows saw the drive correctly and allowed me to install windows to the array which was now correctly drive C:
Once windows was installed, the drive appears under the raid controller same as the array drives.
The drive is fully accessible and working natively with the sata drivers installed.

Quote from: jarvo on 30-January-07, 04:38:13
Yeah, not matter what the HDD order is winxp always tries to boot from the single drive when its plugged in.
Not sure if this only happens to me or if other people have had similar issues.
IDE drivers becomes automatically as 1st HDD. you need to switch them.
have you arranged hard disk boot priority? (not main priority)
have a try to push "F8" or "F11" during post to popup menu, and choice correct HDD to boot from there.

New GL: How to create Profit C. Report with account and statistics combined

Dear Experts,
we are in need to build a report in the new Profit Center accounting (ECC6.0), which is combining the data from new GL table (FAGLFLEXT) and from the statistical key figure table FAGLSKF in one report in order to be able to report on sales per squaremetre for example. Preferabbly, we would like to use report painter/report writer for this, but any other solution how to create this without too much custom programming is highly appreciated.
Thank you very much,
Timo

Dear Experts,
unfortunately, the statistical key figure is in a different table. For this reason it is not enough, to create a new key figure based on the table FAGLFLEXT, because the basic key figure is not there. It is in a different table called FAGLSKF. I tried to merge these two structures by defining new a new evaluation structure based on on flexible analyses in the Logistics-Sales_and_Distribution-Sales_Information_System (transaction mcs7), but the problem is, that I get 16 basic key figures instead of one for the periods. How can this be avoided?
Thanks Timo

Anybody having any luck with raid and x2 on neo2?

Just wondering. I cant get it to work without hanging before the installing devices in windows. tried 1b0(had raid then just disappeared),1b3(has raid but hangs before installing devices and thats after i have to to go into f11 to make it use my array) and 1b4 same thing . Only thing left for me to try is try the 5.10 drivers
So how you get raid to work?

Your signature reads " WD raptor 74gb SATA". Are you using one of them?

K8N Neo 2F - Rebuilding WinXP with Raid and partitions

Hey;
I am having to rebuild this machine. I have 2X250GB (X 4 partitions) raided already, but need to reload windows. When I use the floppy disk F6 function for the SATA raid drivers, will I loose info on other partitions?
Also, there are two versions of the floppy disk raid driver files for this board. One old (the one I have installed now, I think), and one newer. Do I need to use the original drivers, or can I also upgrade the drivers at the same time as well. (And NOT loose info on other partitions?)
Thanks for your expert opinions

Quote from: losmeme on 08-February-08, 02:56:21
Hey;
I am having to rebuild this machine. I have 2X250GB (X 4 partitions) raided already, but need to reload windows. When I use the floppy disk F6 function for the SATA raid drivers, will I loose info on other partitions?
Nop, you will not loose them. Do install(or re-format 1st) in your primary boot partition from XP installation, your others partitions will be intact.

Stock overview based on material and vendor combination

Hi Gurus,
I have a scenario, for three materials A , B, C was bought out from 5 vendor, how to display the stock with material and vendor combination. In client place, the three material (A , B,C) which were bought from same vendor are issued to cost center. Client wants to know the stock based on vendor.
Thanks in Advance.

Hi,
In my opinion you have the following options - basically:
1) Use different material numbers for the physically same material you procure from different vendors (this is the dummiest solution, not recommended)
2) MPN (manufacturing part number) - you use different material numbers corresponding to each vendor . But these materials will be lnked:
http://help.sap.com/erp2005_ehp_04/helpdata/EN/75/ee15c655c811d189900000e8322d00/frameset.htm
3) Batch management
option1 - You apply a certain logic to batch numbers and based on batch number you can distinguish from which vendor the stock was procured.
option2 - You can also use "not speaking" batch number, but here it's more sophisticated to find out from which vendor it was procured
option3 - You can classify the batch and in one of the characteristics you can store the vendor's number
option4 - In the batch master (table MCHA) you can find a "vendor" field (MCHA-LIFNR) - using development you can populate this field at the time of GR
4) Split valuation - you can maintain separate valuation type for each vendor. I think it is recommended only if you want to manage the moving avarage price separately
http://help.sap.com/erp2005_ehp_04/helpdata/EN/75/ee0d4d55c811d189900000e8322d00/frameset.htm
Regards,
Csaba

Help thinking buying a W530 with RAID hardware or software

I'm thinking to buy a W530 with RAID. I have no experience with RAID and never thought that RAID is possible in a labtop.
I have read that RAID comes in types of implementation, software or with a hardware controller. In this forum I read that in the W530 service manual the RAID controller has been disappeared from the motherboard (I have not checked by myself).
Does anyone know if RAID is still implemented by a hardware and not by software.
Frank

From the forums and the rep I spoke with, RAID is implemented in the hardware. You will not be able to enable RAID later on if you did not order it like that from the factory.
You would probably be better off going SSD in the primary and a larger capacity HDD in the ultrabay. You'll have better speed, more reliability, and lower power consumption in general compared to 2 HDD in RAID 0.

First try at a raid and CCC and have an issue?

I recently bought 2 new 4tb seagate drives and an OWC elite pro dual inclosure with esata connections to back up my media files. For the last few years I've used a single drive for my media files and I've backed up that single drive with other single drives via CCC with no issues. I've had succes setting up the new stripped raid with the 2 4tb drives to create 1 8tb volume. However numerous tries to clone my single media drive to the raid using CCC have failed. The raid will unmount after 6 hours sometimes longer. Sometimes CCC will say there were problems with files. Today I reformated the raid back to 2 individual drives. I tried clonning my media drive to just one of the new drives in the new enclosure and it worked fine. I'm running the current version of mountain lion 10.8.4. So it seems to me that there seems to be an issue with the raid I'm setting up and mountain lion or maybe CCC. Anybody have any clue as to what's going on here? My next step is to try the 2 new drives in 2 of my mac pro's internal bays.....set up a raid again and try clonning that way. I was hoping to check in here first to see if someone knows what the issue may be first.
Thanks
Dave

This could be many things, doubtful it is hardware in itself as much as compatibility since each drive functions perfectly fine before the RAID. I would definitely download that driver. You mention energy saver preferences are off (ie unchecking 'Put hard disk to Sleep when Possible'), but keep in mind these preferences only apply to your bootable volume. The driver specifically addresses this issue.
Also, just reading up online and in the forums, ML may be buggy when it comes to 2TB+ volumes (though in theory OSX could support 8EB of HFS+ formatted arrays!). Another option would be to purchase a program that would substitute for OSX native Disk Utility in handling large sized RAIDs:
"Apple’s Disk Utility can be quite flaky with RAID and partitioning. It can crash and do other confusing things; you might have to repartition and/or delete volumes to restore drives to a basic state. For me however, it has never done anything bad to drives/volumes that it wasn’t already asked to operate on. I do not recommend Disk Utility for more complex RAID setups due to its bugs. Consider SoftRAID instead. "
Download the driver first! Best of Luck.
RAID striping and mirroring - Macintosh Performance Guide
Is Mountain Lion mishandling large drives? | MacFixIt - CNET Reviews
"OS X: Mac OS Extended format (HFS Plus) volume and file limits"

Confused about SATA RAID and SATA DVD

I'm planning to build a system based on the P965 Platinum board and I'm considering implementing a RAID 0 array. However, I have read of many problems with RAID and SATA DVD writers. Are most problems just due to BIOS problems or are there more inherent problems? Are people successfully running this board with a RAID array and SATA DVD? Can you boot from the SATA DVD drive?
If I have a pair of drives in a RAID array, can I add further hard drives that will not be in a RAID array? I won't trust RAID for all my data and I don't want to use mirroring.
I'm confused and I can't seem to find any definitive answers on this.
Thanks
Teresa

Quote
Thanks Maesus. Will the drive from an AHCI machine only work in another machine set up with AHCI?
Teresa, yes but not always, this AHCI is driver bound. And because this AHCI is driver bound, it makes it hard to change from IDE to AHCI for a IDE driver installed OS, as the OS doesn't have AHCI driver installed. So when you change to AHCI setting in the BIOS, the OS refuse to load further. AHCI is driver bound, and it is also controller/chipset bound. If you installed an OS with AHCI settings enabled in an AMD system, you may not run that in an AHCI Intel system. Vice versa.
Quote from: Teresa on 20-May-07, 19:51:36
I ask this because there's a thread here that gives instructions on how to turn on AHCI after Win XP has been installed. That tends to suggest that AHCI makes a difference to an operating system install.
This is only because the OS installer doesn't have AHCI driver built-in. If you slip-streamed your OS installer with AHCI drivers, your OS installation will go smoothly.
Quote
Or is it a case that the disk's data can still be read on another machine without AHCI but it can't be used to run Win XP? I just need to know that I can pull my data hard disk out of my system and access it on another older machine that doesn't have ACHI.
Yes, the disk's data still can be read anywhere else. Just that it cannot be used to boot up to WinXP, if that WinXP doesn't have AHCI driver installed.
Quote
Hopefully one day soon I'll reach a critical threshold of knowledge and actually start ordering the parts for my build.
Teresa
Let's make it simple. Treat IDE, AHCI and RAID-0 as different HDD drivers. WinXP has IDE driver built-in. Vista should have all drivers built-in. IDE and AHCI data structure is the same. However, RAID-0 data structure stored in the HDD is different and is controller-bound.
For AHCI mode installed HDD, you can read in IDE mode without single issue.
For IDE mode installed HDD, you can also read in AHCI mode without issue, provided AHCI drivers are installed upfront.
For RAID-0 installed HDD, you cannot read in IDE or AHCI mode, and you may not be able to read in other different controller/chipset systems even though you set them as RAID-0 exactly.

Xserve and xserve raid works with iOS 10.9

xserve and xserve raid works with iOS 10.9

For the Xserve hardware:
OS X Mavericks: System Requirements
The Xserve RAID is known as a DAS (directly attached storage) device and provided the HBA card you're planning to use is fully supported in whatever server platform you've chosen (Apple, Microsoft etc) it will be work regardless of OS version.

Looking for some ideas for setting up and xServe RAID

Everyone,
Here is what I would to do. I have a new xServe and 7TB RAID. I would like to set all of my end users up with Portable Home Directories. They all have laptops and I would like to use their PHD as my backup source. I would set them to sync in the background a couple of times per day and then write to tape at night.I have about 60 end users. I would also like to use the same xServe and RAID as my Kerio mail server and mail store. What I am looking for is some ideas of how to go about setting up the RAID. I was orginially thinking of setting up as one big RAID 5 using all 14 drives. What I would like to know is what is the number of drives that would need to fail that would render the RAID unrebuildable? I am now thinking about splitting the RAID into two 7 drives in RAID set up as RAID 1+0.
I am not sure if I phrased a lot of this currently, but here is quick recap of what I would like to know. What would be the best way to set up a 7TB RAID to store PHD and my Kerio mail store that provides me the most redudant and fastest acccess.
Thanks in advance.
Sincerely,
Daniel Krajc

Daniel,
I'd suggest a 6 disk RAID 5 plus a hot spare for each side. It will give you about 2.4 TB capacity per side (4.8 total), and it can tolerate 2 drive failures per side without losing data, provided there is sufficient time between failures for the RAID set to automatically rebuild on the hot spare. This window is 8-12 hours.
Note with Xserve RAID the two sides are totally independent in the data path -- it will look like 2 separate LUNs. If you want to combine these at the host level, as RAID 0 or RAID 1 to look like a single volume, you can. But the Xserve RAID will not combine them itself... the RAID controllers are independent... it might as well be two separate RAID volumes in the same chassis.
I assume you'll plug this into an Xserve that is serving as an Open Directory server and a file server?

Xserve down and out. Xsan, Final Cut and OSX Server next?

Not looking good for us.
http://www.macnn.com/articles/11/01/17/lion.could.hold.last.server.release.for.m ac.os.x/
http://www.macrumors.com/2011/01/17/apple-considering-discontinuing-more-server- focused-products/

I think I read on this forum that you couldn't work with FCP4.5 projects directly from the Xsan because 4.5 was not POSIX compliant. We're using FCP5 on Xsan 1.1 and storing them on the Xsan for backup purposes. When we want to work on the project at hand we drag it to the desktop and open it from there. Everything works fine. We haven't tried to work with a project from the Xsan.
I'm a little bit confused about your question about LUNs. You can have the metadata and storage on the same LUN if you chose to do so. The way I see it you have three options:
First, if you have a half populated Xserve RAID then format it RAID5 (hopefully you have already done so). Then tell Xsan Admin to use that LUN in a storage pool that can contain both metadata and storage. This would work better if you chose to fully populate the RAID. Then you can add the 2nd LUN to that storage pool.
The 2nd config would be to split up those 7 drives. Do a RAID1 with two drives on the first controller. Then do a RAID5 with 5 drives on the 2nd controller. You would then have two LUNs and two storage pools. The problem with this is you would have to buy a whole new RAID unit if you wanted to add on. However, you would get more performance by spreading LUNs over more controllers with 160MB/s of performance.
The 3rd config would be to do a RAID1 on two drives and then a RAID 5 on 5 drives on the same controller. This would then let you split things up and also add more storage later. You could then add 5 more drives on the other controller and make that a RAID5. Then take the other two drives and do a RAID0 for rendering or audio or something.
The bottom line is there are a few options. The best way to do things is to utilize your bandwidth coming from your controllers.
I'm not sure how the Apple Xsan Support works, but I'd assume they might be nice enough to help out in the set up process.
Good Luck,
Scott Dominick

AFP and Xserve RAID very SLOOOOW

Recently we have been having problems with AFP pegging the Xserve RAID activity lights. Xserve RAID Disk access is very slow.
Machine Specs:
Dual 2.3 GHZ G5 Xserve
1GB RAM (recently downgraded because of memory problems after a power outage)
1x80GB Xserve drive module
3TB Xserve RAID 5
Xserve RAID has been upgraded to 1.5 FW and has both ethernet connections connected.
The whole story is we had a power outage last week. The servers all came back up fine. Throughout the day we noticed that the file server was acting strange. We checked server monitor and it said that RAM slot 3&4 had problems. We opened up System Profiler and it reported that modules 2&3 were only 256MB! (These are 512MB modules). We brought the machine down and pulled the modules. The machine is now at 1GB of memory with more coming. The next day the machine was incredibly slow and the RAIDs access lights were pegged. Also something was pulling all free memory into inactive memory. After trial and error I've found that if I turn off AFP the RAID is no longer pegged and the memory goes back to normal. I thought AFP was the problem and did a complete rebuild of the server last night. This morning the same thing is happening. Also the logs show nothing is wrong.
All of our Macintosh users are Mobile accounts over AFP. We have around 60 Macintosh users. All of our PC users connect using SMB. We have around 20 PC users. All of our network users work off of the file shares.
Thanks for any and all help,
-dustin

Check so that the Xserve RAID diskcache settings are not reset/off.
I have had to take apart the RAID controllers and putting them back togheter again to alleviate slowness/"malfunction" making a couple of RAIDs operating like normal again.
I use Helios Lantest http://www.helios.de/ and XRG to measure/stress disks locally and over the network to see if they are working correctly.

Xsan with Raid and Xserve combined

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