To set up a MegaRAID with Raid 5 on an Xserve follow these steps:
1. Boot the server from OSX Server CD
2. Open the Terminal application
3. Type in the command
megaraid -create auto
4. Close the Terminal application
5. Open the Disk Utility application
6. Create a new partition on the new RAID drive with the Disk Utility application
7. Reinstall the operating system with the Mac OS X server CD or DVD
8. Done
If on reboot the server does a consistency check of the RAID, this process can take a very long time. It may take upwards of 8 or more hours. There isn’t really any indication an Xserve is doing a consistency check on reboot. What happens is the Xserve boots to a gray screen or if you try to hold down the option key the screen will just sit there like it is searching for bootable partitions. Every once in a while you will see the drive activity lights blink but other than that there is no real indication the consistency check is running.
If you want to abort the consistency check and prevent it from automatically running on the next reboot of the server you can boot from a Tiger/Leopard installation CD/DVD and then launch the terminal app from that. Then you need to manually start and then stop a consistency check. After you stop the consistency check, this resets whatever flag the Xserve reads which tells it to automatically run the consistency check on reboot. So now when you reboot the Xserve it should not try to run the consistency check and instead proceed with booting the server normally. Here are the commands to manually start and stop the consistency check:
megaraid -chkcon ld -start megaraid -chkcon ld -stop
In the commands above, replace “ld” with the logical drive number of the RAID you want to check. You can get the logical drive number by running the command:
megaraid -showconfig
It looks like Apple has decided to discontinue its XServe RAID product. When you go to the XServer storage page, there is no sign of the Apple branded XServe RAID product. All that is shown is a RAID hardware product manufactured by Promise Technology. The XServe RAID had a lot of faults so I guess Apple decided to stop trying to reinvent the wheel and let someone else with more experience handle the hardware.