We’re doing a good number of Red Hat Linux installations these days – particularly for customers who are moving to StorNext from Xsan.

We have had some requests to use the existing Apple Fibre Channel cards in Red Hat servers for testing purposes.  Note that this should not be performed on a card you hope to reuse in an Apple server as it likely voids any warranty, but we’ve found the performance and stability to be very acceptable for test environments.

Just installing the card into a Red Hat server – the drivers don’t appear to be built into the system – running a:

cat /proc/scsi/scsi

which in Linux is used to see any "SCSI" (or Fibre) attached devices - didn't show any devices beyond the internal drives.

Fortunately - Apple has been rebranding the LSI-Logic PCI Express Fibre Channel cards for a long time, so we can use their drivers to make the units work correctly:

As a result I downloaded the LSI-Logic PCI-E drivers from here (the current version 4.00.43 only seems qualified for Red Hat 5 and 5,5, not 6, which is fine as StorNext only is qualified with Red Hat 5.5 anyway).

Next, “cd” into the directory where it was downloaded (I put mine in /tmp – it may be somewhere else for you), and run the rpm installation.

cd /tmp/FC_LinuxMPT_RH5_SLES10_4.00.43

cd rpms

sudo rpm -ivh mptlinux-4.00.43.00-1-rhel5.x86_64.rpm.

This will install the RPM driver from the rpms directory. (or you can double-click on the rpm in the GUI)

After this, the storage should be visible – assuming the Linux kernel is able to load the drivers successfully – and you can carry on with using your storage – labelling up the LUNs or migrating your Xsan Volume to StorNext.

Written by: David Colville on March 18, 2011.