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Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Install Centos 5.5 on Dell PowerEdge R910 Rack Server

This server is the highest specification i ever touch. Here's it:

  • Four Processor @ Eight-Core Intel Xeon
  • 112 GB Total RAM
  • Four Hardisk @ 146 GB
  • Integrated RAID Controller
  • OpenManage Dell Management Console

More on: http://www.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/poweredge-r910/pd.aspx?refid=poweredge-r910&cs=555&s=biz

Although Centos 5.5 is not officially supported, i encourage myself to install it because it's brother, RHEL 5.5, is supported. Well i hope i'm lucky.

These are the steps:
  1. First thing i do is configure the BIOS.
  2. At first boot screen press F10 for Sistem Services. With this, you can find detailed information about the system, and there also menu for deploying OS, and several more.
  3. Entering OS deployment menu, i found several OS lists that supported by this system. 
  4. I choose RHEL 5.5, the system shows warning because the DVD is not match. I bypass this, and .. ups, it hangs the system.
  5. Then i rebooted and repeat steps 1-3, and choose another OS. It then rebooted the machine for manual installation.
  6. I skip the first boot menu, and after responding F1 the installation process begins. 
  7. Like ussual Centos installation, firstly it shows Centos installation option. I just enter the default one.
  8. On the partioning phase, i choose custom layout.
  9. Surprisingly the four-hardisk are joined on sda devices with its cummulative size 146 x 4 = 600 GB. I think this caused by RAID5, this machine's default setting. And there's 2G partition on vfat, i guess this is used by Dell System Services. I let it be that way for the current partition setting, and customize the rest 435 GB free space.
  10. I then created new /boot partition with 300 MB size and set to primary partition.
  11. Then i created LVM partition for the rest.
  12. I configure LVM partition with these setting: / 50 G; /home 200 G; /var 160 G; swap 5 G
  13. The format and install steps takes about 1 hour. Quite fast i assume.
  14. After rebooting with the fresh-installed Centos 5.5, i then try to install Dell OpenManage.
  15. to be continued..

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