Dell Creating Virtual Disks and Managing RAID Virtual Disk Limits in iDRAC

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 created. 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 the racadm command 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.

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.

•There are limitations on the number of physical disks that can be included in the virtual disk. These limitations depend on the controller. When creating a virtual disk, controllers support a certain number of stripes and spans (methods for combining the storage on physical disks). Because the number of total stripes and spans is limited, the number of physical disks that can be used is also limited. The limitations on stripes and spans affect the RAID levels as follows:

–Maximum number of spans affects RAID 10, RAID 50, and RAID 60.

–Maximum number of stripes affects RAID 0, RAID 5, RAID 50, RAID 6, and RAID 60.

–Number of physical disks in a mirror is always 2. This affects RAID 1 and RAID 10.

•Cannot create virtual disks on PCIe SSDs.

Creating Virtual Disks Using Web interface

To create virtual disk:

1.In the iDRAC Web interface, go to Overview → Storage → Virtual Disks → Create. The Create Virtual Disk page is displayed.

2.In the Settings section, do the following: a. Enter the name for the virtual disk.

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