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About The Shared PERC 8 Card
The Dell Shared PowerEdge RAID Controller (PERC) 8 card installed on the Dell PowerEdge VRTX system supports Single Root Input Output Virtualization
The PERC 8 card allows four server modules to access a local shared storage. Each server module's operating system loads a Virtual Function (VF) driver that allows the server module to communicate with the Shared PERC 8 firmware. The server module can then be mapped to either a single virtual disk or multiple virtual disks that are located on the shared storage. From a single server module, you can only access the virtual disks that are mapped to that server module.
Configurations of the Shared PERC 8 card
The PowerEdge VRTX system is available in two configurations of the Shared PERC 8 card:
Single Shared PERC 8 Card Configuration — In this configuration, the PowerEdge VRTX system is installed with a single Shared PERC 8 card. The default cache policy for virtual disks created in this configuration is
Fault Tolerant Shared PERC 8 Card Configuration — In this configuration, the PowerEdge VRTX system is installed with two Shared PERC 8 cards. The shared PERC cards are configured in an
Checkpoints are created for all background operations. After a failover, operations are restored from the last checkpoint. The default cache policy for virtual disks created in this configuration is
Host data is also mirrored to the peer controller's cache to allow seamless operation in case of a primary card failure.
Important information regarding the Fault Tolerant Shared PERC 8 Card Configuration:
•Multipath support must be enabled in the operating system for the Fault Tolerant Shared PERC 8 card configuration to function.
•In the event of a controller failover, a Background Initialization (BGI) starts automatically on each virtual disk.
•An ongoing full initialization does not restart in the event of a failover.
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