Dell 745N manual Creating Virtual Disks, Deleting Virtual Disks, Reconfiguring a Virtual Disk

Creating Virtual Disks

The first step in configuring your system for improved system management is creating virtual disks.

NOTE: Virtual disks created using a supported PERC controller card cannot be created from array disks with an aggregate size greater than 2 terabytes (TB). This limitation is a standard SCSI limitation. For example, you cannot select more than 30 array disks that contain 73 gigabytes (GB), regardless of the size of the resulting virtual disk. When you attempt to select more than 30 disks of this size, a message indicates that the 2-TB limit has been reached and that you should select a smaller number of array disks.

To create a virtual disk, perform the following steps:

1.Right-click an array group.

2.Click Create Virtual Disk to display the Create Virtual Disk Express Mode window.

NOTE: Using Express Mode to create a virtual disk selects the maximum number of disks for the selected RAID type. To manually select the number of disks, use Advanced Mode.

3.Select the RAID level that you want to use for the virtual disk.

4.Type the name of the disk in Name and click Finish.

The virtual disk is displayed in the Array Manager console.

Deleting Virtual Disks

NOTICE: Deleting a virtual disk permanently deletes all information contained on that disk.

NOTICE: You must delete all shares and shadow copies from your volume before deleting it. If a volume is removed before all shares of that volume have been removed, the NAS Manager might not display the shares correctly.

1.Right-click the virtual disk.

2.Click Delete.

A confirmation dialog box appears.

3.Click OK to continue.

The virtual disk disappears from the right pane.

4.Reboot your system after deleting a virtual disk and before creating new virtual disks.

Reconfiguring and Managing Virtual Disks

This section summarizes how you can change the virtual disk configuration through the NAS Manager.

NOTE: The PERC 4/DC controller does not detect a drive status change until you attempt to read from or write to the drive. For example, when an unconfigured drive is removed, the controller does not detect the change until a you perform a manual rescan or read/write to the drive.

Reconfiguring a Virtual Disk

Perform the following steps to add array disks to a virtual disk or to change the virtual disk's RAID level.

NOTE: The NAS system supports RAID 1 to RAID 0 and RAID 5 to RAID 0 migrations.

1.Right-click a virtual disk.

2.Click Reconfigure.