12 Oct 2006 prla   » (Apprentice)

Linux on the HP DL380 G4 and MSA1000

Lately, in what should be my part-time occupation for the next few months, I’ve been setting up a couple of HP Proliant DL380 G4 servers in addition to an HP MSA1000 fibre channel disk array. The idea in this case is to have both servers (henceforth the DL380s) working independently while sharing the storage space provided on the disk array (henceforth the MSA1000) and hopefully having some sort of load balancing going on between the two. Despite some limited experience using and configuring Linux systems in the past few years, this comes as a new and refreshing challenge for me, considering these are enterprise class servers, something I’ve never had a change to directly deploy from the ground up and maintain.

DL380 G4s and the MSA1000 The next few posts are then intended to provide a first hand account of the path I’ll be walking during the setup of these systems, which will hopefully be useful both for me later on and whoever comes stumbling across this page looking for information on how to setup these or similar systems. Compiling a new kernel In order to better understand and get acquainted with the servers, I’ve decided to go for a test run with a Debian-based Linux distribution, called Alinex, which is developed here at the University of Evora. Later on, when most configuration stages are figured out, this will become a regular Debian installation instead of this slightly different flavour. Because the kernel that ships with Alinex is not SMP-enabled, a new kernel is needed to take advantage of the two Intel Xeon 3.8Ghz processors inside each server. There’s also the need to support the fibre channel adaptar, as well as the Gigabit Ethernet adapters, etc. Fortunately, most distros attempt to have as many kernel options set for compilation as modules, so using the distro’s .config file is a good idea. Later on, the goal will be to have a thin all statically compiled kernel. The only exceptions, then, were support for the fibre channel driver and SMP. The former must have generic FC support enabled under Network Device Support and the qla2xxx driver should be configured to compile as a module (it didn’t seem to work built into the kernel, as it wouldn’t recognize the firmware upon boot) under SCSI Device Support and SCSI low-level drivers. This driver needs to have the firmware image placed in /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware so it gets found and used by the adapter at boot time. This image - and others for similar qlogic adapters - can be found at: ftp://ftp.qlogic.com/outgoing/linux/firmware In this case, the correct firmware image for the qla2312 adaptar is ql2300_fw.bin. This information can be found in the help page of the driver in the kernel configuration:

21xx              ql2100_fw.bin 
22xx              ql2200_fw.bin
2300, 2312, 6312  ql2300_fw.bin 
2322, 6322        ql2322_fw.bin
24xx              ql2400_fw.bin 

Configuring the MSA1000 disk array Once the DL380s are up and running, attention turns to the MSA1000 disk array which needs to be setup. To do that, the easiest way seems to be using the old-fashioned serial port access method to connect to the MSA1000 command line interface (CLI) facility. In this case, HP provides a serial to ethernet RJ45Z cable, which can seem weird at first because it won’t fit in a regular ethernet port. This should be connected to the front of the MSA1000 controller while the serial should obviously be connected to the host. Here, I’ll be using the DL380 itself to configure the disk array. Communication can be achieved with any terminal emulator, for instance Hyper Terminal under Windows or minicom under Linux. Both have worked for me, although minicom has a minor quirk in the default configuration which kept me from accessing the CLI at all. Also, instead of the usual 9600 baud rate, this one runs at 19200. So, minicom should be configured using the following parameters:

Serial Device: /dev/ttyS0 (or whatever the serial port used happens to be)
Bps/Part/Bits: 19200 8N1
Hardware Flow Control: No (important! default is Yes)
Software Flow Control: No

Also, the kernel needs to support the serial port in order to do this. Once minicom is set up in this way, hitting Enter after it opens will drop you the CLI shell:

CLI>

The CLI has extensive help facilities so every possible command has a verbose explanation of its doing by simply using the help command. There’s also extensive documentation from HP on the MSA1000, in particular the HP StorageWorks 1000/1500 Modular Smart Array Command Line Interface User Guide

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