16 OverviewOperating System SupportThe PERC 6 and CERC 6/i controllers support the following operating systems:• Citrix® XenServer® Dell Edition• Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003• Microsoft Windows® XP• Microsoft Windows Vista®• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (including Hyper-V™ virtualization)• Novell® NetWare® 6.5• Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® Version 4 and Red Hat EnterpriseLinux Version 5• Solaris™ 10 (64-bit)• SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server Version 9 (64-bit), Version 10 (64-bit),and Version 11 (64-bit)• VMware® ESX 3.5 and 3.5iNOTE: Windows XP and Windows Vista operating systems are supported with aPERC 6 controller only when the controller is installed in a Dell Precision™workstation.NOTE: For the latest list of supported operating systems and driver installationinstructions, see the system documentation on the Dell Support websiteat support.dell.com. For specific operating system service pack requirements,see the Drivers and Downloads section on the Dell Support site at support.dell.com.RAID DescriptionRAID is a group of independent physical disks that provides high performance byincreasing the number of drives used for saving and accessing data. A RAID disksubsystem improves I/O performance and data availability. The physical diskgroup appears to the host system either as a single storage unit or multiplelogical units. Data throughput improves because several disks are accessedsimultaneously. RAID systems also improve data storage availability and faulttolerance. Data loss caused by a physical disk failure can be recovered by rebuildingmissing data from the remaining physical disks containing data or parity.CAUTION: In the event of a physical disk failure, a RAID 0 virtual disk fails,resulting in data loss.
