Re: Stable on Blade server

On Fri, 23 Feb 2007, John Nielsen wrote:

On Friday 23 February 2007 07:12, Marian Hettwer wrote:
Hi there,

On Fri, 23 Feb 2007 11:06:54 +0100, Martin <list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,

I work for a little web agency/isp and we are going to buy new hw to
sustain the growinng demand of our customers.

We're 100% FreeBSD-only and i was looking to buy IBM blade servers: can
anyone reccomend any of them? models? particular hw/firmware/misc

we have several blade centers in our datacenters. None of them were able to
boot up 6.1-RELEASE (which was the last one I tried). In general, the IBM
blade center is crap IMO. The management capabilites (some java / vnc
applet speak KVM over IP) is completely borked. Debian Linux runs, but
FreeBSD seems to have problems with the way those IBM blades are handling
the keyboard. Dunno any details, though :) Maybe you'd like to take a look
at HP's blades. I recall that the FreeBSD project got a HP blade donation
and is using a fully equipped HP Bladecenter. Maybe HP is your way to go if
you want to use FReeBSD on blades :)

HTH,
Marian

PS.: If I'll find the time to do so, I'll try a pxeboot of 6.2-RELEASE on
some different blades of us. Although this won't happen before end of next
week (to busy right now).

I can also recommend HP blades in general. I haven't had a chance to play with
FreeBSD on one, but the hardware is solid and the management interface is
good. There's a JVM-based remote console that works on most platforms I've
tried as well as the IE-only one. The IE-only one has built-in floppy/CD
support and a couple other tricks, but there's also a standalone JVM-based
media applet.

I'm 99% sure that the built-in SAS controller is supported by ciss(4), and 90%
sure that the built-in ethernet controller is supported, probably by bge(4).
I'm not sure about the fibre controllers.

The ethernet controllers in BL35ps and BL45ps are supported by bge. The
fibre channel mezzanine card is supported by isp, and works fine. You've
got to watch out if you want to use the half-height blades with FC,
though. Firstly you need the 'enhanced' backplane. Secondly, there are
only two connectors for each slot (for two ports on each card) so for half
height blades the two blades in the slot are connected in to two
arbitrated loops. You need to plug them in to a switch that supports this.

In any case, FC seems to be a very expensive way to get a limited
bandwidth (200MB/s) link to a storage array (the SAS didn't exist when we
got our blades). You need to really need the extra features and really not
need the bandwidth for it to be worthwhile.

We don't have any of the new style blades, so all of this is probably not
very useful to someone buying a new enclosure :-)
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