CentOS 6.x and Dell md3000i Setup Guide

UPDATE 06/20/2013 – Included steps to update Dell Firmware and BIOS. I also updated when to setup the /etc/mulitpath.conf file, updated the order of some software install steps and fixed some formatting and mistakes to make the process more smooth.

UPDATE 03/30/2013 – The original post used older tools to try and make this work. I had issues with multipath and decided to call Dell as my MD3000i was still in warranty. While they would NOT support this or my OS, they did offer me the latest Resource CD and answered a few questions along the way. Thanks to their help, and various blogs on the interwebs, I can confidently setup CentOS 6.4 to a Dell MD3000i utilizing MPIO. I’ve also submitted this blog to my technician, along with my /etc/multipath.conf file to share with the Dell ESS team should any other Dell customers inquire on this setup, they would have a reference. I’ve successfully setup three different Dell servers using this procedure.

Recently I worked on a project to stand up a CentOS based XEN environment using Dell hardware. I’ve used Linux in the past, mostly on test machines and for specific software vendor builds. My experience and day-to-day in my career has been in Windows Server administration, so I decided to extensively document my configuration and experience during the setup over a series of posts.

The hardware involved (minus switching, Cisco) in this project is all Dell, specifically, Dell PE servers (M600’s) and a Dell MD3000i. The XEN servers will be utilizing the iSCSI space for 3.8TB of R10 storage.We are using some specialty software that requires the use of CentOS, so the base OS for these boxes will be CentOS 6.4. By choosing CentOS 6, this will allow us to use XEN v4.

Dell supports RHEL6, so they inadvertently support CentOS 6 as well; however, the md3000i product is EOL, no further firmware updates have been released, and the resources will not officially support RHEL6. I documented my setup and configuration of the host components as I went and turned it into this guide so that anyone searching for help with this particular setup may be helped.

http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os-applications/w/wiki/red-hat.aspx

 

Before beginning this guide, I assume that you have your server built fresh and are ready to begin configuration. Need help installing CentOS 6? You can find the ISO here:

http://isoredirect.centos.org/centos/6/isos/x86_64/