I’ve been configuring some Dell servers today that have one of Dell’s MD3220 storage arrays attached. The servers were completely blank so they needed kickstarting with CentOS 5.x. Not a problem, just use the standard one that’s used for 99% of the servers.
The problem that arises is the standard kickstart assumes the first disk it sees should be the disks internal to the server and partitions accordingly but annoyingly the installer loads the mpt2sas driver first for the HBA’s used to hook up the storage array, and then loads the megaraid_sas driver for the built-in RAID controller used for the internal disks. This means the internal disks could be anywhere from /dev/sdc onwards depending on what state the array is in.
An undocumented boot option is driverload= which seems to force the supplied list of drivers to be loaded first before anything else that’s detected. I found reference to this option in this post along with use of the nostorage boot option. However when I used the following options:
nostorage driverload=sd_mod:megaraid_sas |
The installer still loaded the mpt2sas driver but it did force the megaraid_sas driver to be loaded first. This could just be a bug that mpt2sas isn’t on the list of “storage” drivers but the net result is acceptable in that /dev/sda now pointed to the internal disks. After the server rebooted /etc/modprobe.conf also had the correct scsi_hostadapterX aliases to keep things in the right order.