Users Guide

• 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:
– 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.
b. From the Controller drop-down menu, select the controller for which you want to create the
virtual disk.
c. From the Layout drop-down menu, select the RAID level for the Virtual Disk.
Only those RAID levels supported by the controller appear in the drop-down menu and it is based
on the RAID levels are available based on the total number of physical disks available.
d. Select the Media Type, Stripe Size, Read Policy, Write Policy, Disk Cache Policy, T10 PI
Capability
.
Only those values supported by the controller appear in the drop-down menus for these
properties.
e. In the Capacity field, enter the size of the virtual disk.
The maximum size is displayed and then updated as disks are selected.
f. The Span Count field is displayed based on the selected physical disks (step 3). You cannot set
this value. It is automatically calculated after selecting disks for multi-raid level. If you have
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