NVIDIA MCP55 Pro RAID

[jmace]

After a lot of research and deliberation decided to ditch my VMWare Server 2.0 Windows installation for my integration testing needs in favor of Proxmox. I was really getting tired of the lack of support of their web-based management tool in the latest version of Firefox and chrome. I also wanted something lightweight that just plain worked. Most of my work is geared towards Microsoft products just because the vast majority of our clients use their Web servers, but that's here nor there.

The mainboard I am using is the supermicro H8DAE-2 (http://www.supermicro.com/aplus/motherboard/opteron2000/mcp55/h8dae-2.cfm) that uses the NVIDIA MCP55 Pro SATA2 controller. I have 4 500 GB drives attached to it and have the controller enabled in the BIOS. I set up a raid 5 array just like I did for my Windows install. However, when I installed Proxmox it did not see the single raid array, instead, it saw each individual sata disc (sda, sdb, sdc, sdd). I was able to successfully install Proxmox on sda. I was also able to successfully partition and mount the remaining drives as ext3.

My plan is to have only proxmox installed on sda, all of my ISOs on sdb, all of my virtual machines on sdc, and my backups on sdd. Eventually, I plan on shipping my backups to an external drive or NFS.

Since I only use my virtual server for testing purposes, not being able to install proxmox on this motherboard using a raid 5 array, it's not a showstopper for me. However, I would like to know if this is a limitation for others, and for future knowledge, has anyone been able to successfully set up proxmox using raid 5 on this controller and how were you able to do so.

Thanks in advance,
Jim

 

[tom]

Proxmox VE does not support fake raid, you need to use a real hardware raid controller - search the forum, discussed around 100 times.

 

[jmace]

Help me out here, what part is considered "fake"

 

[Milkwyrm]

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

[h=3]Firmware/driver-based RAID[/h] A RAID implemented at the level of an operating system is not always compatible with the system's boot process, and it is generally impractical for desktop versions of Windows (as described above). However, hardware RAID controllers are expensive and proprietary. To fill this gap, cheap "RAID controllers" were introduced that do not contain a dedicated RAID controller chip, but simply a standard drive controller chip with special firmware and drivers; during early stage bootup, the RAID is implemented by the firmware, and once the operating system has been more completely loaded, then the drivers take over control. Consequently, such controllers may not work when driver support is not available for the host operating system.^[28]
Initially, the term "RAID controller" implied that the controller does the processing. However, while a controller without a dedicated RAID chip is often described by a manufacturer as a "RAID controller", it is rarely made clear that the burden of RAID processing is borne by a host computer's central processing unit rather than the RAID controller itself. Thus, this new type is sometimes called "fake" RAID; Adaptec calls it a "HostRAID".
Moreover, a firmware controller can often only support certain types of hard drive to form the RAID that it manages (e.g. SATA for an Intel Matrix RAID, as there is neither SCSI nor PATA support in modern Intel ICH southbridges; however, motherboard makers implement RAID controllers outside of the southbridge on some motherboards).

 

[jmace]

OK, I'm with you now. I was just a little confused as to what Tom was getting at. Thanks for the explanation. I don't deal a lot with Linux and Windows makes it almost stupid easy. You are right, dedicated controllers are pretty spendy.