HP/Compaq SmartArray series

1. Vendor information

Theses HP/Compaq cards are usually well supported on Linux.
Proliant servers usually (always?) have this kind of controllers.
HP supports Linux and provide an opensource kernel driver which has been part of Linux for ages.

2. Linux kernel drivers

There is only one drivers to handle all cards:

Driver	Supported cards
cciss	All SmartArray

You should not expect any problems with theses drivers which are known to be mature and stable.
We don't know any current Linux distrubtion which miss theses drivers so no additional step should be required to get it working.

Some lspci -nn output examples:

• 02:04.0 RAID bus controller [0104]: Compaq Computer Corporation Smart Array 64xx [0e11:0046] (rev 01)
• 0f:00.0 RAID bus controller [0104]: Hewlett-Packard Company Smart Array Controller [103c:3230] (rev 03)

2.1. Devices nodes note

This driver doesn't use the regular SCSI stack, so don't expect to find your logical drives as /dev/sdX.
Here is an example:

server:~# ls -lah /dev/cciss/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root     160 2008-08-28 14:36 .
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root    3,1K 2008-08-28 14:36 ..
brw-rw----  1 root disk 104,  0 2008-08-28 14:36 c0d0
brw-rw----  1 root disk 104,  1 2008-08-28 14:36 c0d0p1
brw-rw----  1 root disk 104,  2 2008-08-28 14:36 c0d0p2
brw-rw----  1 root disk 104,  3 2008-08-28 14:36 c0d0p3
brw-rw----  1 root disk 104, 16 2008-08-28 14:36 c0d1
brw-rw----  1 root disk 104, 17 2008-08-28 14:36 c0d1p1

/dev/c0d0 means logical drive 0 on controller 0. /dev/c0d0p1 means first partition of logical drive 0 on controller 0.
In exemple /dev/sda is /dev/c0d0 here. /dev/sdb1 is /dev/c0d1p1.

3. Management and reporting tools

Both opensource and proprietary tools currently exist.
Both are edited by HP/Compaq but the opensource one (cciss-vol-status) only covers monitoring.
The proprietary one (hpacucli) adds management features.

3.1. cciss-vol-status

There's not much options for cciss-vol-status so let's have a look to an example first:

vmware:~# cciss-vol-status /dev/cciss/c*d0
/dev/cciss/c0d0: (Smart Array 6i) RAID 1 Volume 0 status: OK.
/dev/cciss/c0d0: (Smart Array 6i) RAID 1 Volume 1 status: OK.

This command will print status of all arrays. You need to query all controllers (if you have more than one) but query the first logical drive only is fine (otherwise you will have duplicated lines).
That's why you should really use /dev/cciss/c*d0.