Red Hat Enterprise Linux v4 on Intel Xeon 6500 and 7500 based PowerEdge Servers

Dell currently ships the following PowerEdge servers based on Intel Xeon 6500 and 7500 series processors:

· PowerEdge R910
· PowerEdge M910
· PowerEdge R810

Red Hat and Dell do not support Red Hat Enterprise Linux v4 on these Servers.

This article attempts to document issues with RHEL4 on these platforms for customers who might still want to install and use RHEL 4 or other non-subscription based distributions based on RHEL 4 on the above listed Dell Servers and do not expect support from Dell/RedHat for OS issues.

The information in this article is based on observations on RHEL 4.8, kernel-2.6.9-89 and is meant purely to document known limitations and behaviors without support. For all queries, please post to https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge

Installation
  • RHEL 4.8 x86 functions normally after successful installation with 2 x 8-Core Intel Xeon 1.86 Ghz processor with 64 GB RAM.
  • RHEL 4.8 x86 and x86_64 function normally after successful installation with 4 x 8-Core Intel Xeon 1.86 Ghz processor (with Logical processors disabled in the BIOS and 64GB RAM for x86).
Known Issues
General
  • RHEL 4 x86 version has a limitation of supporting a Maximum of 32 logical CPUs. If you are using 6 cores or more per CPU/ socket and if all the four sockets are populated, please ensure that logical processors are disabled or limit the numbers of cores to less than 32 through CPU options in the BIOS
  • CPU throttling might not work depending upon the load on the server.
Network
  • Broadcom 5709, the LOM (Lan on Motherboard) on these servers, showed no issues with normal network operations.
Storage
  • SAS 6/iR and Perc H200 controllers seem to work as expected. H200 would require driver update to RHEL 4.8.
Graphics
  • Matrox Graphics MGA G200eW controller was used and the commonly used resolutions seem to work.
Systems Management:
  • Dell OpenManage was not installed/tested on these Servers with any update of RHEL 4.