LSI Web interface?

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spacecakes

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Hello, does the LSI raid cards have a web based raid management feature like the Areca cards have? The Areca cards have, from what i understand, a hardware nic that you connect to the network and then login via webbrowser for raid management, what's LSI's contrary? All i can see is software stuff and a bios accessable on boot?
 
LSI has a 'web bios' where you can use mouse/keyboard but honestly its slower and more of a PITA for setting stuff up then Areca in its text-based GUI with only keyboard support.

I don't know of any web interface for the LSI's but it certainly isn't a hardware solution with its own NIC, it would be software running on the machine.

For actually managing the raid while booted their is megacli. Its a pretty powerful tool but OMFG its not intuitive at all and a much bigger PITA to use (areca's is much more intuitive/user friendly in that aspect).

That being said I can do everything you would ever need to do in megacli as I am very familiar with it. Lots of machines I manage at work have LSI controllers/raid (500+ servers) and also 500+ with areca controllers so I am very intimately familiar with both.

With areca I have actually gotten them to add features and change things in their CLI on my request directly to the CEO. I can't say I have had that happen with LSI, LOL.

EDIT:

Also lots of machines with 3ware. 3ware is probably the simplest of all of them and a fairly easy CLI (better than LSI) but both in the BIOS and in the CLI it simply isn't powerfull enough and lacks a lot of features/power that you get on LSI/areca that they have in their CLI and BIOS utilties.
 
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houkouonchi said:
LSI has a 'web bios' where you can use mouse/keyboard but honestly its slower and more of a PITA for setting stuff up then Areca in its text-based GUI with only keyboard support.

I don't know of any web interface for the LSI's but it certainly isn't a hardware solution with its own NIC, it would be software running on the machine.

For actually managing the raid while booted their is megacli. Its a pretty powerful tool but OMFG its not intuitive at all and a much bigger PITA to use (areca's is much more intuitive/user friendly in that aspect).

That being said I can do everything you would ever need to do in megacli as I am very familiar with it. Lots of machines I manage at work have LSI controllers/raid (500+ servers) and also 500+ with areca controllers so I am very intimately familiar with both.

With areca I have actually gotten them to add features and change things in their CLI on my request directly to the CEO. I can't say I have had that happen with LSI, LOL.

EDIT:

Also lots of machines with 3ware. 3ware is probably the simplest of all of them and a fairly easy CLI (better than LSI) but both in the BIOS and in the CLI it simply isn't powerfull enough and lacks a lot of features/power that you get on LSI/areca that they have in their CLI and BIOS utilties.
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hmm i'm familiar with mdadm and with it's raid management it is very easy to rebuild/add drives to an existing raid while the server is booted so no reboots is needed, Arecas web based raid management seemed like the closest i could get to mdadm, but the areca cards are very pricey, worth it? And LSIs megacli solution seems abit tricky and aimed for the experts?

thanks
 
I've never had an issue with megacli, I've always found it relatively straight forward and easy to use. The web bios is easy enough to use out of the box for setup.

Since you'er asking for a web interface, I'm assuming you're trying to manage the card remotely through it. I think this is the wrong way to manage a system, you should be using IPMI and then get you get all the systems features through one interface.
 
gamepin126 said:
I've never had an issue with megacli, I've always found it relatively straight forward and easy to use. The web bios is easy enough to use out of the box for setup.

Since you'er asking for a web interface, I'm assuming you're trying to manage the card remotely through it. I think this is the wrong way to manage a system, you should be using IPMI and then get you get all the systems features through one interface.
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I have ipmi for that particular server but my main concern with hardware raid is having to reboot the system to rebuild/add drives to the array. I don't need to traverse over to hardware raid just thought it would be cool and LSI or Areca is the way to go from what i've read?
 
not all raid cards require booting into the bios to add/delete/rebuild/etc. Many have CLI tools to do this from linux, windows, etc...
 
spacecakes said:
I have ipmi for that particular server but my main concern with hardware raid is having to reboot the system to rebuild/add drives to the array. I don't need to traverse over to hardware raid just thought it would be cool and LSI or Areca is the way to go from what i've read?
Click to expand...

I don't really know of any decent raid controllers that force you to reboot the machine to manage vdisks. If you're replacing a bad drive, it will rebuild automatically once it's swapped. There's nothing in the web bios that you can't do through megacli. The only reason I use it at all is for the initial installation of the OS.
 
gamepin126 said:
I don't really know of any decent raid controllers that force you to reboot the machine to manage vdisks. If you're replacing a bad drive, it will rebuild automatically once it's swapped. There's nothing in the web bios that you can't do through megacli. The only reason I use it at all is for the initial installation of the OS.
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Wonderful, thanks for clearing this up for me guys! I'm thinking of buying the LSI 9266-8i, do i have to install some drivers in linux in order to access the card through mega cli or just the megacli software?

And by any chance do you guys know if this card works with the new 6tb drives that just come out? I'm pretty sure its a SAS2 card so shouldn't be a problem right?

And last, is there other cards i should take a look at instead of the 9266-8i?
 
On linux the kernel will support the card out of the box unless its a non standard distro as including the megasas driver (which is the driver) is a standard thing to enable and has been included in linux kernel source for like a decade.

Megacli is just a binary executable which should work as long as the driver is loaded so its not that difficult at all.

And yeah you can create raids, add disks, and pretty much do everything you would do on the BIOS through megacli its just a bit more complicated and less intuitive than the others but there is no requirement to ever boot into the BIOS.
 
houkouonchi said:
On linux the kernel will support the card out of the box unless its a non standard distro as including the megasas driver (which is the driver) is a standard thing to enable and has been included in linux kernel source for like a decade.

Megacli is just a binary executable which should work as long as the driver is loaded so its not that difficult at all.

And yeah you can create raids, add disks, and pretty much do everything you would do on the BIOS through megacli its just a bit more complicated and less intuitive than the others but there is no requirement to ever boot into the BIOS.
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Sounds great. Iv'e also noticed that LSI provides a client software that enables you to manage lsi controllers remotely. I can only assume that it works something like: You login on the client as the LSI server root user, then it sends and receives commands through megacli and displays them on the client in a gui? Basicly it translate the megacli interface into a gui for remote use?
 
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