Proxmox on Dell R520

[Wasca]

Hi All

I'm new to proxmox and I'm considering buying a Dell R520 with a Broadcom 5719 Quad Port Network Card and a PERC H710 Raid Card.

Is there anywhere I can go to find out if proxmox will run with this hardware?

Regards

Wasca

 

[squadra]

since the kernel is based up on the openvz kernel, which is based on rhel6, it should work fine if rhel6 supports the 520.

i had a PE 720 for testing, and rhel recognized the bcm chips with its latest kernel.

 

[chrisalavoine]

How did you get on with this? We recently had a bunch of problems installing the Proxmox ISO on an R520. In the end we had to install Debian Squeeze and then Proxmox on top (not ideal but it worked).

I have, however, since the install, noted some odd behaviour using VIRTIO drivers on my Ubuntu VM's. The samba fileserver VM I know works, as I have it installed on various other R510/Proxmox setups, appeared to be getting very slow transfer speeds, although running an iperf test showed it as being ok. Any SAMBA/CIFS transfers we were getting ~1.2MB/sec. After many hours of barking up the wrong tree... i.e. thinking it was cables/duplex/switch/ports I decided to try the e1000 drivers on my VM and boom! everything back to normal, getting normal transfer speeds for a gigabit network connection.

Anyone else run into this problem with an R520?

I believe that there are different models of R520 out there with different MOBO's and of course there are many different Dell RAID cards, we had the H710. I will check on the NIC models on our new R520, but the R520 we have that works fine uses the Broadcom 5720's.

Regards,
Chris.

 

[pilcheck]

Wasca, et al,

Though not exact, we have one Dell R710 with the Quad port Broadcom and a PERC 6/I controller. Proxmox performs great!
It is _very likely_ that Proxmox will run on the R520 hardware.

Tip: Your configuration must be RAID 10 if you want to avoid disk performance issues, and as chrisalavoine said, if you have any VM network issues give e1000 a try!

How did you get on with this? We recently had a bunch of problems installing the Proxmox ISO on an R520. In the end we had to install Debian Squeeze and then Proxmox on top (not ideal but it worked).

I have, however, since the install, noted some odd behaviour using VIRTIO drivers on my Ubuntu VM's. The samba fileserver VM I know works, as I have it installed on various other R510/Proxmox setups, appeared to be getting very slow transfer speeds, although running an iperf test showed it as being ok. Any SAMBA/CIFS transfers we were getting ~1.2MB/sec. After many hours of barking up the wrong tree... i.e. thinking it was cables/duplex/switch/ports I decided to try the e1000 drivers on my VM and boom! everything back to normal, getting normal transfer speeds for a gigabit network connection.

Anyone else run into this problem with an R520?

I believe that there are different models of R520 out there with different MOBO's and of course there are many different Dell RAID cards, we had the H710. I will check on the NIC models on our new R520, but the R520 we have that works fine uses the Broadcom 5720's.

Chris,
Your situation sounds a lot like what I just experienced, outlined here: http://savagesysadmin.com/ssa-knowledgebase/detail/proxmox-to-sd-card-on-dell-poweredge-r710

I installed to a SD card but it wouldn't recognize the LVM partition. Just had to add "rootdelay=10" to GRUB menu so LVM had time to be recognized.