[OpenIndiana-discuss] Dell R510 SAS2 Backplane with SAS2008 (PERC H200)

[Andy Lubel]

Im sorry you got that idea, I totally agree with you.. But I came across this oracle Solaris 11 document that stated that expanders were not supported although I have used them in both the 7000 series (with the j series expanders) and using commodity expander shelves with commodity lsi based sas hba's. Either the dell isn't doing something special or oracle has put something in that makes it work only with specific manufacturer bits?  The fact that Solaris 10 works perfectly has me quite confused. 

None of them were sas2 though.. And these 2tb 6gbps sas constellation drives make me suspect somebody frankenstiened some technology that solaris 11 and OI doesnt like.  I don't think dell made the expander although I have no clue to find out who actually did. 

Sas info shows nothing regarding expanders..  I really want to figure this out because at 7k for 12 3.5" slots and 2 hidden 2.5" internal drives this r510 would be an ideal candidate for those who live in a regime where building the hardware solution can't involve building from ground up. 

I'm going to throw in some straight up sas drives and see what happens. Unless you may know a command to gather more troubleshooting information. 

On Nov 30, 2011, at 22:09, "James C. McPherson" <james.c.mcpherson at gmail.com> wrote:

> On  1/12/11 08:57 AM, Andy Lubel wrote:
>> I dont think its the controller card so much as I think its something to do
>> with the disks/backplane/power management even.  It works fine if I create
>> raid volumes.  if you wanted to be similar to Rich, you could just do a
>> bunch of raid 0's with a perc 600.  Using any type of raid with ZFS creates
>> its own challenges in both performance tuning as well as recovery.
>> 
>> I would buy a 1U pizza box and a SAS HBA and JBOD.. In the past I had the
>> 1078 chips connected to a AIC JBOD, never had issues, but then again it was
>> solaris 10..  Made expansion super easy.  I do miss my thumper still though
>> :)
>> 
>> Oracle says pretty clear that they dont support any type of expanders,
>> funny cause the J45xx series are all expanders..
> 
> 
> What do you actually mean by this? Expanders are in use
> in the Jxxxx series, they show up as sgen (or ses) devices.
> Expanders respond to SCSI Enclosure Services commands.
> 
> To the best of my recollection, there's no command interface
> for SAS Zoning in OI or Solaris 11, but if you want that
> you should be able to bolt things together using the usmp(7i)
> interface.
> 
> 
> James C. McPherson
> --
> Solaris kernel software engineer, system admin and troubleshooter
>              http://www.jmcp.homeunix.com/blog
> Find me on LinkedIn @ http://www.linkedin.com/in/jamescmcpherson
>