Dell PowerEdge 9G servers (x9xx, 840, 860, SC1435, and SC440) can work well with Debian, provided you have a new-enough kernel or are willing to backport drivers from a new-enough kernel to your older kernel.

The three PowerEdge components that cause the most difficulty for new Debian sysadmins are the PERC 5 SAS RAID controllers (megaraid_sas driver), the SAS 5 non-RAID controllers (mptsas driver), and the Broadcom gigabit network adapters (bnx2 driver).

Installing Debian using a recent kernel

Your options include:

1. Install using Etch
2. Install using a Sarge CD image from http://kmuto.jp/debian/d-i/ which includes the Sarge installer with recent kernel.org kernels.

OMSA

Debian sysadmins Sander Keemink and Bas van der Vlies have graciously ported OMSA 5.1 to Debian and made their packages available online.

• Announcement
• Local copy of files
or ftp://ftp.sara.nl/pub/outgoing/dell/ or ftp://ftp.sara.nl/pub/sara-omsa/dists/dell/sara/binary-i386/
• add to /etc/apt/sources.list:
  deb ftp://ftp.sara.nl/pub/sara-omsa dell sara

But I don't want to use OMSA...

Then you'll want to use either OS-provided tools, or some specific vendor tools.

• IPMI: two tools

   apt-get install openipmi
   apt-get install ipmitool
  		

• LSI SAS RAID tools: MegaCLI, MegaRAID Storage Manager, MegaRAID SAS SNMP

Other gotchas

Some 9G servers (PowerEdge 1950, 1955, 2900, and 2950) present their onboard NICs as Gb1 and Gb2 in BIOS, but these map to eth1 and eth0 respectively ("backwards") under Linux. This is fixed in kernel 2.6.19-rc3 and higher. You can also use udev rules to set the mapping as you may like.