Fedora and Intel EM64T Xeon Processor based machine

[Mark Farmer]

ranjeet walunj wrote:
> Hi group.
> 
> I'm sorry for the lame question without posting any facts.
> Yes we have purchased the dell poweredge 1850 with dual XEON and two
> SCSI HDD.
> Yes before purchasing we checked that it is supporting RHEL3.
> 
> But we just gave a thought that Fedora might get installed on it and we
> will be able to save some money.
> 
> But we want FEDORA to install on it with hardware RAID. 
> We have tried installing from dell's bootable cd where it can only
> support windows 2003 or RHEL3.
> 
> Can someone put some light on where we can search HOWTO's or document
> about installing it with hardware RAID ?
> we will RTFM if we get some pointers.
> (We dont have any expertise with RAID.)
> 
> On Dell's linux discussion list someone spurted that S/W RAID is better
> than Hardware RAID on Poweredge 2850 (we have 1850). According to my
> knowledge this cannot be hold true. Can someone throw some extra light
> on this?
> 
> Sorry again for putting mail without facts.
> 
> Regards,
> Ranjeet Walunj


The hardware raid on dell servers is normally preconfigured at the factory based on the setup 
you chose when you purchsed it, however.....

If the server has a raid controller you should be able to configure the hardware array using 
the config utility - something like ctrl + a (Look for instructions just after you switch the 
machine on). Once you have configured an array, you should be able to boot from a Fedora CD and 
the array should show up as a single scsi disk in the partioning screen (probably sda).

Software raid has come a long way over the years, I run it on a PE1750 but as a general rule 
hardware raid is better and has less overhead.

-- 
Mark Farmer
Linux System Administrator