Users Guide
Table Of Contents
- Lifecycle Controller User's Guide
- Introduction
- Using Lifecycle Controller
- Operating system deployment
- Monitor
- Hardware inventory view and export
- About view and export current inventory
- About view and export factory-shipped inventory
- Viewing hardware inventory — current or factory shipped
- Exporting hardware inventory — current or factory shipped
- Viewing or exporting hardware inventory after part replacement
- Viewing or exporting current inventory after resetting Lifecycle Controller
- Lifecycle Controller log
- Firmware update
- Configure
- System control panel access options
- Configuring iDRAC
- Configuring system time and date
- Configuring RAID
- Configuring RAID using software RAID
- Creating a secure virtual disk on a RAID controller
- Key encryption
- Local key encryption mode
- Breaking mirrored drives
- System setup — Advanced Hardware Configuration
- Collect system inventory on restart
- Configuring a local USB drive
- Configuring NFS and CIFS servers
- Conditions while configuring HTTP or HTTPS server
- Maintain
- Easy-to-use system component names
- Using the system setup and boot manager
- Troubleshooting and frequently asked questions
○ Write Back — The controller sends a write-request completion signal as soon as the data is in the controller cache, but
has not yet been written to the disk drive. The Write Back policy may provide faster 'write' performance, but it provides
less data security, because a system failure can prevent the data from being written to the disk drive.
○ Force Write Back — The write cache is enabled regardless of whether the controller has an operational battery. If the
controller does not have an operational battery, data loss may occur in the event of a power failure.
● Disk Cache Policy— Select the write policy.
○ Enabled — The controller enables physical disk cache setting while creating virtual disks.
○ Disabled —The controller disables physical disk cache setting while creating virtual disks.
● Assign a Hot Spare Disk if available — Select this option to assign a hot spare to the virtual drive. A hot spare is an
unused backup physical disk drive that is used to rebuild data from a redundant virtual drive. A hot spare can be used only
with a redundant RAID level. Hot spares also have physical disk-drive size requirements. The hot spare must be as large as
or bigger than the smallest physical disk-drive included in the virtual drive. If the RAID level and physical disk-drive availability
do not meet these requirements, a hot spare is not assigned.
NOTE: Assign a hot spare only from disk drives populated across slots 0–3 of the system. For slot information, see the
PowerEdge Owner's manual at https://www.dell.com/poweredgemanuals.
● Hot Spare Disk — Select a disk that is used as a hot spare. Only one dedicated hot spare is supported in Lifecycle
Controller.
● Secure Virtual Disk — Select to secure the virtual drive using the controller’s security key.
NOTE: The secure virtual drive is created only if the controller security key is created and the selected disks are
Self-Encrypting Drives (SEDs).
Viewing summary
The Summary page displays the virtual disk attributes based on selections.
CAUTION:
Clicking Finish deletes all existing virtual drives except any foreign configurations that you specified.
All data residing on the virtual drives is lost.
To return to a previous page to review or change selections, click Back. To close the wizard without making changes, click
Cancel.
Click Finish to create a virtual drive with the displayed attributes.
Configuring RAID using software RAID
For the S140 / S150 controllers, ensure to change the SATA settings in the system BIOS to RAID Mode. To change the setting
using the BIOS, the latest BIOS version must be installed. For more information about the BIOS versions for different systems,
see the Lifecycle Controller Release Notes at https://www.dell.com/support/article/sln311809.
NOTE:
● For more information about RAID configuration, see the Creating RAID using Lifecycle Controller white paper here.
● If you have an older BIOS, you can configure RAID only through option ROM.
● Software RAID creation using NVMe/HHHL drives supports only on UEFI mode.
● Software RAID doesn't support any encryption method such as SEKM, LKM, TCG OPAL etc.
Use this feature to configure RAID, if a PERC S140 / S150 controller is enabled on the system. If you select the software RAID
option, you cannot create partial virtual disk through the Lifecycle Controller interface and it displays the physical disk-drives as
the Non-RAID disks or RAID-ready disks.
● Non-RAID disk—A single disk-drive without any RAID properties. Needs initialization to apply RAID levels.
● RAID-ready disk—The disk drive is initialized and a RAID level can be applied.
NOTE:
From Lifecycle Controller UI, you can deploy only Windows server operating system using software RAID
controller.
To configure software RAID:
1. Start Lifecycle Controller. For more information, see Starting Lifecycle Controller.
2. In the left pane, click Hardware Configuration.
3. In the right pane, click Configuration Wizards.
4. Under Storage Configuration Wizards, click RAID Configuration to launch the wizard.
The View Current RAID Configuration and Select Controller page is displayed.
Configure
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