Preamble This article was written a few years back, but never published - it was some work I was doing in my lab to try and get to grips around the work involved in creating a SAN with synchronous replication built in from scratch.
It in no way should be used for production, but rather as a learning exercise - as previously stated the instructions are a few years old and version specific, so openSUSE may well now support some of the modules I had to compile and create repos for manually, also DRBD9 has been released and should obviously be used in place of DRBD8 as I have below.
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I had problems recently on a Dell R720XD giving problems when trying to install openSUSE, regardless of the mode I set it up in I would get strange vertical coloured lines on the monitor. It’s a graphics driver problem clearly - the solution, on the openSUSE boot screen, move to Installation and in the boot options section type in:
nomodeset Then go ahead and continue your install as normal - seems the 3D driver causes problems (with this box at least). Took me about an hour to figure this one out, I worked through all the graphics options including Text Mode - none worked except the above.
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Introduction Centrally managing your storage is nice - especially when you’ve just built your own SANs (or such). I created a synchronous replicating SAN cluster using LSI MegaRAID 9270-8i cards in 2x Dell R720XD chassis built on openSUSE 12.3 (more on that in another article soon).
We are migrating from 2x Dell MD3000i to these beasts built on a pure-cli OS. Some people like GUIs and that’s okay - so for day-to-day admin, email reporting on problems and basic configuration and tasks LSI offer (free) MegaRAID Storage Manager ↗. It works much in the same way as Dell’s MD Storage Manager ↗ that we currently use for the MD3000i but (obviously) without the ability to create iSCSI LUNs etc as they are managed by the OS, not the RAID card.
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