Hello,

I'm speccing out a new server (HP Proliant DL320/DL360) and I noticed that all of the HP 1RU servers use the HP Embedded 4-Port B120i SATA Controller which according to this site http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/ente...x#.UzR8PvldXTo has are no drivers for Ubuntu. I am looking to use the RAID 1 settings with two drives and I want to make sure that it will work with Ubuntu. Does anyone use these systems and know if there's a 3rd party driver somewhere that will work? Or if HPs site is just wrong and it will work?

The B120i is a "fakeRAID" controller, meaning it's a regular 4-port SATA controller with RAID support in the BIOS and (Windows) driver.

The SATA controller itself seems to work fine under Linux ("The Ubuntu 12.04 certification was completed in SATA mode"), so you should be able to run software RAID using the md driver.

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Thanks for the reply.

I am kind of new to hardware administration so please bare with me. From the research I've been doing this afternoon, I read that there is a setting in the BIOS of these machines where I can change the controller to use SATA mode. I think took a look at how one uses the md driver (Again, I am not super experienced with the hardware aspect here) and was having some issues figuring it out. Basically I read that the command would look something like:

That seems too easy to be the solution to me. Do you have any links to resources (or if you could share personal experience) that would be extremely helpful to me.

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Also this afternoon I created a virtual machine with Ubuntu installed on it. I then added a second disc so that I could then try to create a software raid (RAID 1) using mdadm with the 2 discs. I followed these instructions: http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-set...buntu-10.04-p3 (Granted, that was Ubuntu 10 and I was playing with Ubuntu 12) and I completely bonked my VM (Thankfully, a blank one). It wouldn't load when I selected it in GRUB. So after running through this exercise, I'm all ears for suggestions and tutorial links.

Thanks in advance.

It is basically that easy, except the installer usually performs the above step during the installation.

In order to boot from an md volume, the (RAID-aware) bootloader will have to load the kernel and an initrd from the drives that are part of the yet-unactivated RAID array, and then the initrd will have to activate the array before proceding the boot the actual OS. Fortunately, this is something most installers and all bootloaders support.

Migrating an existing non-RAID installation onto a set of md devices is slightly tricky, as it involves migrating data, rebuilding the initrd and changing the boot loader configuration. It's definitely doable, but nowhere near as easy as installing from scratch to a new software RAID array.