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Server 2008 R2 on Mac Mini with hardware RAID?

F

funkyfresh69

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 25, 2011
55
0
Hi all,


Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere - i couldn't find anything..

I’d like to run server 2008 R2 on a Mac Mini server with 2 drives mirrored in hardware. Is this possible, and what would be the procedure?
Bootcamp doesn't support RAID as far as i can tell, but i wouldn't be using Bootcamp, id installed 2008 natively.

My 2010 MBP ran Windows 7 natively, without bootcamp, so im assuming 2008r2 wouldn't be a problem?
 
funkyfresh69 said:
Hi all,


Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere - i couldn't find anything..

I’d like to run server 2008 R2 on a Mac Mini server with 2 drives mirrored in hardware. Is this possible, and what would be the procedure?
Bootcamp doesn't support RAID as far as i can tell, but i wouldn't be using Bootcamp, id installed 2008 natively.

My 2010 MBP ran Windows 7 natively, without bootcamp, so im assuming 2008r2 wouldn't be a problem?
Click to expand...

I have run 2008r2 many times, including setting up a 2008r2 hyper-v cluster using a macbook and macbook pro! (had to do a little magic network bridging to get hyper-v to use the wifi network but otherwise it worked perfectly for POC).

You are not going to be able to do hardware raid however - Apple simply doesn't make it an option. Just like on the laptops, Apple cripples a lot of the functionality built into the Apple chipsets - in the case of their efi-->bios translation this means disabling AHCI. So not only can you not do hardware raid, you won't be getting ahci/ncq/trim/etc and your disks will be running in ATA mode. Not the end of the world, but annoying nonetheless.

Hopefully one of these days Apple will get with it and start putting uefi 2.x on their machines and then we'll be able to boot win7x64/2008r2 natively via efi. As far as I know even the 2011 models (my mbp at least) still uses uefi 1.x sadly.
 
Luda has done a lot of work on hacking ahci into the intel chipset models including the 2011 mbp recently. There are tradeoffs but none that should concern a server that doesn't need to sleep. And yea software mirroring will function just fine...

I plan to use one or more of these together with thunderbolt arrays as hyperv hosts. Have to wait for promise to provide windoze drivers first though...
 
as an aside, i’m thinking of running server 2008r2 as parallels vm under lion.

my thoughts are that i would then have the benefit (for lion) of hardware raid and also that the whole VM is backed up by TM. This would make rolling back the server quite easy.
Disadvantages are that there is an overhead both memory and CPU wise rather than running natively.

Any thoughts?
 
I have been thinking about the same since the promise Pegasus doesn't have windoze drivers yet. Although I would lose the ability to easily move my VMs over to my main hyper-v hosts...
 
Yes you can add a hardware raid to it. But it is not a drop in kind of deal

the RAID need to be external, bring the 2nd SATA port out as eSATA with eSATA to SATA cable adapter

Use one of hardware raid0/1 driver-less bridge like IMIRROR525A, eSU2-RD controllers, still boot from the 1st drive
 
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