Poweredge R805

T

thefool808

Guest
Cannot boot the CD Installer on a Poweredge R805 (dual socket quad core opteron). It gets to the "Booting the system... Press F2 for verbose mode" screen and hangs. Cannot get verbose mode going and can't switch to any other consoles... Same system boots Ubuntu 8.04, and the CD I burned does boot up fine in other systems.

Downloading debian etch right now to see if that'll boot...
 
Make sure you bring the BIOS up to date. I found I had lots of kernel issues with some of the newer linux builds until I did this on a few boxes.
 
Thanks for the reply.

The server is at the latest BIOS. Good thing too, because it seems the only way to update my BIOS is with floppy (which of course this system doesn't have), or from an installation of one of Dell's supported operating systems...

Also, I just successfully booted the debian-40r3-amd64-netinst ISO. So no help there unless there's another debian ISO I could try.

I think it might be helpful, at least in the future, if the installer defaulted to verbose mode. Maybe I could see what was hanging, though it's almost instantaneous.

Lastly, is the web interface code available somewhere? Maybe I could integrate it into an Ubunutu Server install (with KVM and OpenVZ).

Thanks again.

Julian
 
As I understand there are other web GUIs for OpenVZ.

http://binarykarma.com/easyvz.php

What would be nice, though, if ProxMox could act as a "master" GUI for any type of OpenVZ server, perhaps thru some sort of agent process that can be run on an OpenVZ box.
 
I think it might be helpful, at least in the future, if the installer defaulted to verbose mode. Maybe I could see what was hanging, though it's almost instantaneous.

Just type 'debug' on the boot prompt. Then the system starts in verbose mode and gives you sh access at various stages (type CTRL-D or exit to continue installation). Does that give you some hints?
 

easyvz is not a web gui for an existing openvz host and the development seemed stopped. binarykarma is working on a commercial solution for managing exisiting vm. webvz is a webgui for openvz hosts, vtonf is also an openvz managing tools targeted for hosting providers. there are also others, manly targeted to existing xen servers.

all these solution does not provide:

- installation of the 2 virtualization technologies (bare metal)
- KVM full virtualization AND openVZ (we also take care about the resource control if you run KVM and OpenVZ guests which is very important)
- integrated backup/restore with vzdump (eg. via LVM snapshots)
- certified and ready to run and supported virtual appliances (we are working on this for release 1.0, providing more here)

the idea is, Proxmox VE provides everything you need to run server applications and also the applications. you buy a hardware and use Proxmox VE with the virtual appliances provided.

currently we are integrating our vzdump in the web gui - very fast and easy to handle backup tool (online via LVM snapshots). (in the meantime, vzdump needs to be configured on the console, cron job).
 
Tom:

All true.

However, ProxMox is limited to 64-bit machines, in order to fully support KVM. What I would like is some "Mini node" version of proxmox that is OpenVZ-only and runs on older, 32-bit systems or non-VT enabled hardware, so I can use my 64-bit ProxMox master node to control them. 32-bit and 64-bit non-VT systems aren't completely useless, especially ones that have a lot of memory on them, they are perfectly suitable for straight OpenVZ. It would be great if ProxMox could be the unifying platform for all of the servers, even if some of them can't do KVM.
 
Proxmox VE needs 64-bit,but Intel VT only if you need KVM

Tom:

All true.

However, ProxMox is limited to 64-bit machines, in order to fully support KVM. What I would like is some "Mini node" version of proxmox that is OpenVZ-only and runs on older, 32-bit systems or non-VT enabled hardware, so I can use my 64-bit ProxMox master node to control them. 32-bit and 64-bit non-VT systems aren't completely useless, especially ones that have a lot of memory on them, they are perfectly suitable for straight OpenVZ. It would be great if ProxMox could be the unifying platform for all of the servers, even if some of them can't do KVM.

Proxmox VE can run on all 64-bit CPU, also on non-VT. if no VT is available, only OpenVZ will work.

Why do we choose 64-bit?
32-bit and a lot of memory is a non-existing pair. you can use a PAE enabled kernel to support more than 4 GB (up to 64 gb) but this memory cannot be used for some operations and therefore you cannot benefit as you expect. Only a 64-bit kernel can really benefit and the ressource scheduling model will work as expected.

Proxmox VE is primary designed to run on servers. Intel and AMD delivers 64-bit capable cpu´s since more than 3 years. now, if you assume you can only think of virtualization if you have good and reliable hardware, who will decide to use such old boxes? 64-bit cpus are already mainstream.

combined with a very new kernel (2.6.24) we support a wide range of systems.

Managing non Proxmox VE installations with our management interface will be problematic as we did a lot of changes and optimizations on our Kernel, partitioning and toolset to interact with the management tools - this is our main benefit in contrast to "management only" solutions.
 
Just type 'debug' on the boot prompt. Then the system starts in verbose mode and gives you sh access at various stages (type CTRL-D or exit to continue installation). Does that give you some hints?

Thanks.

I am trying to take screen shots (with a digicam) of the beginning of a stack trace that occurs but then flies past the screen. Anyways I do have a screen shot of the final output before the hang.

http://www.luminapower.com/img/screenshot.jpg

Julian
 
It seems to get past the hang point if I completely disable the LSI SAS Controller in BIOS. So, something to do with the Fusion MPT driver (mptbase)... :confused:
 
currently we are integrating our vzdump in the web gui - very fast and easy to handle backup tool

Lots of software provide easy backup tools. Its always the easy restore thats absent.
It always amazes me, because I don't mind spending an hour or even a day on configuring backups. The restore is what counts when it comes to backups...

I've tried all controlpanels mentioned and some more. If PVE v1.0 delivers on what v0.9b promises then none of them come close in cost effective easy deployment and management of virtual servers.
 
Lots of software provide easy backup tools. Its always the easy restore thats absent.
It always amazes me, because I don't mind spending an hour or even a day on configuring backups. The restore is what counts when it comes to backups...

I've tried all controlpanels mentioned and some more. If PVE v1.0 delivers on what v0.9b promises then none of them come close in cost effective easy deployment and management of virtual servers.

And here I thought you were gonna post something along the lines of "hold down the F7 key and it will boot up with hardware raid functioning" :p
 
Anyways... I can get PVE installed on my R805 with the LSI Controller enabled in BIOS, but no hardware RAID set up (JBOD). Should be fine for testing right now. Unfortunately there's no non-destructive RAID setup choice on the controller so I can't set it up without RAID and then build the RAID retroactively.
 
And here I thought you were gonna post something along the lines of "hold down the F7 key and it will boot up with hardware raid functioning" :p

Sorry, after I posted I realised the thread had returned to the original topic, I didn't mean to highjack or anything.
But by any means try the F7 key, you never know :p
 
This looks like the following bug:

http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9909

Do you have an Fusions MPT RAID controller, but no drives attached? Either attach a drive, or disable/remove the controller. Does that help?

Our next kernel version already include a fix for above bug.

- Dietmar
 
The LSI Controller rebranded as the Dell SAS 6/iR has the Fusion MPT chip. It only works when the drives are not in a RAID configuration (either 1 or 0).

Thanks for the help.

This looks like the following bug:

http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9909

Do you have an Fusions MPT RAID controller, but no drives attached? Either attach a drive, or disable/remove the controller. Does that help?

Our next kernel version already include a fix for above bug.

- Dietmar
 

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