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FreeBSD on HP BL460c Blade Servers

Tuesday, July 17, 2007 at 10:25 am by Brady Wilson

We have standardized on HP servers and use blade servers whenever possible for our Managed client solutions.

The BL460c blades have a pair of embedded HP NC373i gigabit adapters. They have a Broadcom 5708 chipset.

Initially when we started using the C class blade servers in late 2006 we could not get networking to work under FreeBSD 6.2 RELEASE with the BL460c blade servers.

Once FreeBSD was installed it was not even seeing the “bce” adapters. We searched and searched and only found others with a similar problem.

HP doesn’t officially support FreeBSD on its gear so we could not get support there.

It also appeared that drivers had already been implemented for these adapters in an older release of FreeBSD so these “bce” adapters should work out of the box. Something done specifically with those adapters in the BL460c blade servers was causing issues.

The first step was for us to get a STABLE release of FreeBSD 6.2 several months later which apparently had further adapter driver updates as seen in CVS. We grabbed a STABLE iso image and after install the “bce” adapters were now visible and operational.

The second step was for us to configure 802.1q VLAN tagging on the NICs because of the way the blade chassis switches were uplinked to our network distribution layer. Left untagged with no VLANs the adapters wouldn’t communicate with the network.

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2 Comments
 

I’m wondering how you are getting on with the HP BL460c and FreeBSD? We are looking at moving all our FreeBSD systems to this platform and wondering if you have encountered any other issues?

Specifically have you had any problems with the HP Smart Array E200i controller and FreeBSD? Has the performance been good with the 2.5″ SAS drives?

Posted by nikolai
Monday, September 24, 2007 at 6:21 pm

So far we have not run into any other issues with FreeBSD on the blade servers. We don’t have any high end applications running on the FreeBSD blade servers at this point – only simple web hosting.

The drives are the same drives used in the DL series of servers and we haven’t had any issues with those whatsoever.

The only difference between the platforms is the model of the controller- the E200i as you mentioned. We have not run into issues with it. We have not heard of or witnessed any performance issues, although we have not performed any specific speed tests with this match up either.

Posted by Brady Wilson
Tuesday, October 02, 2007 at 9:13 am