I have a couple of R805s and the MD3000i.

We had problems getting the clustering/failover to work properly a few months back, and opted to wait for R2 (live migration, no need for seperate LUNs, etc). We have a few VMs running nicely on a WS08 RTM host (the first R805) stored on the md3000i.

Now that we've received the media for R2 (and the latest R805 bios supports it), i've installed it on the second R805 we have and tried to connect it up WITHOUT any dell drivers, and just using the native iscsi stuff (for testing purposes).

With some fiddling, ive managed to connect it to the san, but it seems things are handled slightly differently as any LUNS that are made available to it show up twice (multipath enabled).

Does anyone know if this is an R2 specific thing, or whether its just because i havent installed any dell drivers for the san?

Dell tech support guided me here, as they said alot of the cutting edge stuff would be done here and they tend to be playing catch up (not expecting any R2 support for quite a while).

According to one of our engineering contacts, you'll want to install MDSM as well as the Dell drivers -- that should fix the quirkiness and multiple LUNs that you are seeing.

Drivers & Resource CD with MDSM can be found here:
http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/driverslist.aspx?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd&os=WNET&osl=en&catid=&impid=&SystemID=PWV_MD3000I

Thanks Jeff

Will there be no problem in terms of compatibility between the drivers and R2 though?

*should* work, although I just heard there are updated drivers that may be available as early as next week.

I've been on the wrong end of those 'shoulds' before.. haha.. think I may just be able to wait a couple of weeks then.

Many thanks Jeff.

I had previously been led to believe that the best configuration for this setup (2x hosts sharing a san) was to just install the drivers on the R805s, connect them up with iscsi and use a third box to install MDSM and conifgure from there.

Would you suggest that having the drivers and MDSM installed on anything connected to the SAN would be better then?

"I've been on the wrong end of those 'shoulds' before.. haha.. think I may just be able to wait a couple of weeks then.

Many thanks Jeff.

I had previously been led to believe that the best configuration for this setup (2x hosts sharing a san) was to just install the drivers on the R805s, connect them up with iscsi and use a third box to install MDSM and conifgure from there.

Would you suggest that having the drivers and MDSM installed on anything connected to the SAN would be better then?"

I would use the MD Configuration Utility on any hosts that you connect to the MD3000i -- it will add what's necessary for each host.

hi
new firmware + mdsm+ressource cd available today to support 2008R2
available on support.dell.com
hope it will help

Hi :) Can you please confirm support for R2 and MD3000i because list of supported OS at http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/osmatrix/index?c=us&l=en&s=gen&~ck=anavml does not have any OS from 2008 generation. Is that list not updated because when I go to driver download page for MD3000i there are in dropdown box Windows Server 2008 x86 and x64 but not R2. 10x and best regards

The updates were released on 10/7/2009
- New OS support for Windows 2008 R2 Server, SLES 11, SLES 10 U3,
RHEL 4.8, RHEL 5.4.

Supported Operating systems
PowerVault MD3000i

Novell SuSE Linux ES 11
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 x64
Red Hat Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
Novell SuSE Linux ES 9 SP4 x86_64
Novell SuSE Linux ES 10
Red Hat Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
Microsoft Windows 7 32-bit
Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 x86
Microsoft Windows Server 2003
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x64

See (compatability)
http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&cs=2684&l=en&s=pub&releaseid=R242364&SystemID=PWV_MD3000I&servicetag=&os=WNET&osl=en&deviceid=12882&devlib=0&typecnt=0&vercnt=7&catid=-1&impid=-1&formatcnt=1&libid=52&typeid=-1&dateid=-1&formatid=-1&fileid=350400

Would recommed updating MDSM > power cycle host(s) then update Raid Controllers and NVSRAM on the MD3000x > power cycle the stack

- RC firmware to 07.35.31.60
- NVSRAM x.005

Always have a validated backup prior to updating.