Creating Virtual Disks - Dell iDRAC 8 User Manual

• Assign or unassign dedicated hot spares
• Blink and unblink virtual disks
NOTE: You can manage and monitor 192 virtual disks if auto-configuration is enabled through PERC controller BIOS,
Human Interface Infrastructure (HII), and Dell OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA).
Related links

Creating virtual disks

Editing virtual disk cache policies
Deleting virtual disks
Checking virtual disk consistency
Initializing virtual disks
Encrypting virtual disks
Assigning or unassigning dedicated hot spares
Managing virtual disks using web interface
Managing virtual disks using RACADM
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, WS-MAN, 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:
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