Dell Hell

Had to contact Dell today for some assitance with their new PowerEdge 2950 servers we have just bought. We planned to run raid6 on all 6 drives and use that both for the OS and storage.

Seemed like a good plan till I realised partitions => 2GB are not supported without efi support but more importantly grub and lilo can't boot EFI/GPT configured drives.

There however is a workaround for this in the form of a linux kernel driver for EPI support to access those big partitions called efivars and a boot manager called efibootmgr which seems like a modified version of lilo.

The kernel module required seems to be included with the currently linux kernel in RH/Centos 5.1 but the efibootmgr http://linux.dell.com/efibootmgr/ needs to be installed and the disk partioned with an EFI partition for boot at the start of the disk as outlined in http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Installation_Guide-en-US/s1-diskpartitioning-x86.html.

Seems simple enough but as an admin used to fdisk I could not achieve this in DiskDruid without some further instruction.

On calling Dell support I was told that support can not be given as I'm not using thier OEM RH 5.1 CD and rather a downloaded version without their branding which would have no effect on issues I could face yet they still leave me unsupported!! After explaining for 10 minutes the situation did not change, and asking to speak to a supervisor resulted in the original operator rejoining the conversation to re iterate how Dell support will not help to resolve this issue and ending the conversation in a manner that led me to believe that was the last I'd hear from Dell.

However, today just as I had finished cussing Dell support I had a phonecall from a knowledgable chap with an Irish accent who talked me through possible options and one I was not aware of before. Raid on the raid controller supplied with the PE 2950 can be configured to create virtual disks on the raid arrays and unlike I had guessed you can have more than one of these per raid array so it's possible to create a small virtual disk that grub/lilo can boot and still use one raid6 array so no space is wasted :)

Just wanted to add the first support op who I spoke to called me back yesterday to confirm my resolution was successful. I'm still not clear if I miss understood the original operator and I was to be helped he just wasn't positive I'd get the support I needed as other customers haven't had success or if my call was listened to and a different action to the usual decided on since I presented myself as a very influential client.