I’m thinking about purchasing a Dell R730 with PERC H730 RAID controller, installing Ubuntu LTS 20.04, and setting it up to use as a Veeam hardened repository. I’m not very experienced working with Linux, and even less so on installs. I’m not finding much online as to how compatible this hardware would be with this version of Ubuntu. Does anyone have experience or comments to offer?
I have not tested it with Ubuntu but we are using XCP-NG (CentOS based) with a R630 and the PERC H730 Mini which is working fine. So I assume it will work.
Two days ago I install Linux Mint 20.3 (based on Ubuntu 20.04) on a r730 just for a test. No issues.
Hardware raid is pretty obsolete now days. I wouldn’t recommend it. Watch this video on the explanation
If you are going to be installing Ubuntu then do so on it’s own drive and leave the storage data on its own array in a zfs pool.
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An update for anyone who finds this post with the same question. I successfully installed Ubuntu LTS 20.04 on an R730 with the PERC H730 RAID controller, directly onto a RAID 1 boot volume.
There were no problems with the RAID controller itself. However, I did have a minor problem with the network card. I have the 0C63DV network daughter card with 2x 1GB ports and 2x 10GB SFP+ ports using the Intel X520 chipset.
The problem I had was with the SFP+ module. I was using a 10Gtek module that is popular on Amazon, but evidently is uncertified on Ubuntu. The Ubuntu installer gave an error message in passing related to this, but more importantly, did not present my 10GB network interface for configuration.
I solved this problem by replacing the 10Gtek SFP+ module with an Intel module, and everything else when very well.
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