On 03/04/2011 09:00 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
>
> On 3/3/11 6:52 PM, Chuck Munro wrote:
>> >
>> > I've been on a real roller coaster ride getting a large virtual host up
>> > and running. One troublesome thing I've discovered (the hard way) is
>> > that the drivers for Marvell SAS/SATA chips still have a few problems.
>> >
>> > After Googling around quite a bit, I see a significant number of others
>> > have had similar issues, especially evident in the Ubuntu forums but
>> > also for a few RHEL/CentOS users.
>> >
>> > I have found that under heavy load (in my case, simply doing the initial
>> > sync of large RAID-6 arrays) the current 0.8 driver can wander off into
>> > the weeds after a while, less so for the older 0.5 driver in CentOS-5.
>> > It would appear that some sort of bug has been introduced into the newer
>> > driver.
>> >
>> > I've had to replace the Marvell-based controllers with LSI, which seem
>> > rock solid. I'm rather disappointed that I've wasted good money on
>> > several Marvell-based controller cards (2 SAS/SATA and 2 SATA).
>
> I replaced separate SII and promise controllers with a single 8-port Marvell
> based card and thought it was a big improvement. No problems with centos5.x,
> mostly running RAID1 pairs, one of which is frequently hot-swapped and
> re-synced. I hope its not going to have problems when I upgrade.
>
Since I have the luxury of time to evaluate options, I've just
downloaded Scientific Linux 6 to see what happens with either the mvsas
or sata-mv driver. This is my first experience with SL but I wanted
native ext4 rather than the preview version in CentOS-Plus. Even if I
stick with SL-6 as the KVM host, I'll continue using CentOS as guest
machines. If the Marvell drivers don't pan out, it looks like I'll have
to either spend money on a 3Ware|LSI|Promise controller or revert to
CentOS-Plus 5.5 for ext4.
SL-6 is installing as I write this.
Chuck
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
