Users Guide

● Delete
● Edit policies
● Initialize
● Check consistency
● Cancel check consistency
● Encrypt virtual disks
● Assign or unassign dedicated hot spares
● Blink and unblink virtual disk
● Cancel background initialization
● Online capacity expansion
● RAID level migration
NOTE: You can manage and monitor 240 virtual disks using iDRAC interfaces. To create VDs, use either Device Setup (F2),
PERCCLI command line tool, or Dell OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA).
NOTE: PERC 10 count is less since it does not support daisy chain arrangements.
Creating virtual disks
To implement RAID functions, you must create a virtual disk. A virtual disk refers to storage created by a RAID controller from
one or more physical disks. Although a virtual disk may be created from several physical disks, it is seen by the operating system
as a single disk.
Before creating a virtual disk, you should be familiar with the information in Considerations Before Creating Virtual Disks.
You can create a Virtual Disk using the Physical Disks attached to the PERC controller. To create a Virtual Disk, you must have
the Server Control user privilege. You can create a maximum of 64 virtual drives and a maximum of 16 virtual drives in the same
drive group.
You cannot create a virtual disk if:
● Physical disk drives are not available for virtual disk creation. Install additional physical disk drives.
● Maximum number of virtual disks that can be created on the controller has been reached. You must delete at least one
virtual disk and then create a new virtual disk.
● Maximum number of virtual disks supported by a drive group has been reached. You must delete one virtual disk from the
selected group and then create a new virtual disk.
● A job is currently running or scheduled on the selected controller. You must wait for this job to complete or you can delete
the job before attempting a new operation. You can view and manage the status of the scheduled job in the Job Queue page.
● Physical disk is in non-RAID mode. You must convert to RAID mode using iDRAC interfaces such as iDRAC web interface,
RACADM, Redfish, WSMan, or <CTRL+R>.
NOTE:
If you create a virtual disk in Add to Pending Operation mode and a job is not created, and then if you delete the
Virtual disk, then the create pending operation for the virtual disk is cleared.
NOTE: RAID 6 and 60 are not supported in PERC H330.
NOTE: BOSS controller allows you to create virtual disk only of size equal to the full size of the M.2 physical storage media.
Ensure that you set the virtual disk size to zero when using the Server Configuration Profile to create a BOSS virtual disk.
For other interfaces such as RACADM and WSMan, the virtual disk size should not be specified.
Considerations before creating virtual disks
Before creating virtual disks, consider the following:
● Virtual disk names not stored on controller—The names of the virtual disks that you create are not stored on the controller.
This means that if you reboot using a different operating system, the new operating system may rename the virtual disk
using its own naming conventions.
● Disk grouping is a logical grouping of disks attached to a RAID controller on which one or more virtual disks are created, such
that all virtual disks in the disk group use all of the physical disks in the disk group. The current implementation supports the
blocking of mixed disk groups during the creation of logical devices.
● Physical disks are bound to disk groups. Therefore, there is no RAID level mixing on one disk group.
Managing storage devices
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