Recommended motherboard with hardware raid for Linux

Posted by luison on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by luison
Published on 2010-02-03T09:38:08Z Indexed on 2010/04/09 18:23 UTC
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raid

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server-hardware

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linux

Hi. We want to setup an internal office server for testing jobs (LAMP), email and samba. Only about 5-10 users. We are also considering starting to virtualize, initially by a base Ubuntu Server with Xen or VMWare Open Source server. Our current system runs with a Linux Raid which has worked great but it's always been complicated to recover the boot sector when one the drives fail and therefore I would prefer using now a hardware raid instead, but ideally with some kind of software monitoring. For this reason and considering we don't want to spend a fortune a I would appreciate any comments on the following options.

Motherboard with RAID with linux support... which could you recommend.
Motherboard + Hardware Raid card...
Adaptec does not seem to have great Linux suppport.
3Ware seems to have a tc soft controller which we've used on a hosting company, but hard to find here in Spain.
HP Proliant type basic server, which?
Dell Small Servers... any good for Linux?

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

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