r270ba
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Raid 5 and Dell Open Manage
We just purchased a Dell PowerEdge 1750 with a RAID 5 controller, 3 76 gig 10,000 RPM SCSI drives. When I ran the Dell OpenMange cd I partitioned the drive at 40gb. Then once I installed 2003 Server I went into the Disk Manager and allocated the other 120ish gb to the d:. How do I know that the Raid 5 will work for the d: partition? Is there a way to test. The controller came with software but I am not 100% sure how to use it. Should I have allocated the 120 gb using its software as a Virtual drive? Or did it do the same thing buy allocating it using disk manager?
Thanks.
Thanks.
If you reboot the machine and hit <CTRL>M when prompted while the array controller posts, you should see one RAID5 container. The OS will see this as one single ~140GB drive. Your D: partition is part of the RAID-5 container. As long as the array controller has one RAID-5 container, you are OK.
ASKER
You mean like backplane(channel 0)? When I go into the RAID mgt I see 3 disks (which is correct). The are contained in 1 array controller listed under Backplane(channel 0) and there is nothing listed under channel 1. Is this correct?
ASKER
Actually it goes like this:
+Arrays
+PERC Subsystem 1
+Array Group
+Virtual Disks
-Array Disk 0:0
-Array Disk 0:1
-Array Disk 0:2
+Backplane(Channel 0)
-Array Disk 0:0
-Array Disk 0:1
-Array Disk 0:2
Channel 1 (Ready)
+Arrays
+PERC Subsystem 1
+Array Group
+Virtual Disks
-Array Disk 0:0
-Array Disk 0:1
-Array Disk 0:2
+Backplane(Channel 0)
-Array Disk 0:0
-Array Disk 0:1
-Array Disk 0:2
Channel 1 (Ready)
Those (3) drives, from what you tell me, are configured as a hardware RAID 5 drive. In other words, you have (3) harddisks acting as one physical drive. When Windows is installed, it sees just one physical drive -- it does NOT have any idea about the individual harddisks that make that disk space up. At that point, you are partitioning that RAID 5 drive into as many logical drives as you like. If you made all of the usable space into one 150GB drive, it would be RAID 5. If you instead made a total of (15) 10GB drives, they would all be RAID 5. Once you've made those drives part of the RAID 5, it doesn't matter how many partitions you make, they're all covered under that same RAID 5 -- for better or for worse. If one of the drives degrades (fails) all of those partitions are affected at the same time, but you should still be fine as far as data loss is concerned.
Does that make sense?
You can use Windows disk manager to configure the partitions just fine. It sounds like your setup is right-on. :)
Chumplet
Does that make sense?
You can use Windows disk manager to configure the partitions just fine. It sounds like your setup is right-on. :)
Chumplet
ASKER
Is there any way to test this before I move production over to this server? These drives are supposed to be hot swappable...should I pull one while the machine is on?
Also I was under the impression that with RAID 5 you can lose a drive and still work from the other 2 without losing data....then once a new drive came in rebuild it and you would be back up and running on 3 drives again.....is this wrong?
Also I was under the impression that with RAID 5 you can lose a drive and still work from the other 2 without losing data....then once a new drive came in rebuild it and you would be back up and running on 3 drives again.....is this wrong?
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ASKER
Thanks a lot Chumplet!
what if i want to add in an additional harddisk to my Dell machine, i want it to be part of the RAID, can it be done ?