RSTe vs ESRT2 [CentOS 6]

[JSmit63]

Hi,

I have Server Board S2600GL with RAID C600 chipset and Upgrade Key: RKSATA8R5 (Intel RSTe or Intel ESRT2 8 ports SATA RAID 0, 1, 10, 5).

Installed SATA hard drives (8 pieces) with RAID 5.

Historically, this situation are :

Installed CentOS 6.5 (64-bit) _without_ special Intel RAID drivers.

In BIOS menu "Mass Storage Configuration" set:

AHCI Capable SATA controller = Disabled

SAS/SATA Capable controller = INTEL RSTe

All worked fine since summer 2013.

Details in attached file.

After a failure of one hard drive (everything is fine now) I found this information:

http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/CS-033209.htm http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/CS-033209.htm

This applies to: Intel® Server Board S2600GL

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3* with KVM (32-bit & 64-bit) only supported in AHCI or ESRT2 mode"

My questions are:

1. whether it is necessary immediately migrate whole server to another location and reconfigure the current Intel RSTe controller mode to ESRT2 mode (and migrate server back) ?

2. Where to find the Intel ESRT2 drivers for CentOS 6.5 (64-bit) ?

3. If I do not switch to ESRT2 mode and the driver is not installed (ie leave it as is), what awaits me in the future?

[idata]

John,

Intel(R) ESRT2 has support for the Intel(R) C600 chipset on both AHCI Capable SATA Controller and SATA/SAS Capable Controllers. ESRT2 supported operating systems are Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. According to the page you reference, for CentOS* 6.x we have only tested under a basic installation scenario. Intel does not provide technical support for CentOS* 6.x. You should contact the related open source community for support.

Currently we only support RSTe under Windows* operating systems.

Because of this we can't fully answer your questions.

Regards,

John