Apple’s PCI Express Fibre Channel HBA works great under RHEL AS 4, at least Update 3. So does the PCI-X Fibre Channel HBA, now that I think about it. I thought I’d mention this since Apple hasn’t updated their knowledge base article in some time.

These cards continue to use the standard mptbase/mptscsih modules, so if you add one to an existing host you have to stick something like:

alias scsi_hostadapter1 mptbase
alias scsi_hostadapter2 mptscsih

in /etc/modprobe.conf. This is pretty much the standard operating procedure for these cards, so no surprises.

I’ve been using an Apple Xserve RAID under Linux for about four years now, and I love it. Dave over at alienraid.org has more information about running Apple’s storage hardware on other OSes. In general, if you can find a fibre channel HBA that works with your OS and get the right cabling between the HBA and the array you will have no issues.