• Assign or unassign dedicated hot spares• Blink and unblink virtual disksNOTE: 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 linksCreating virtual disksEditing virtual disk cache policiesDeleting virtual disksChecking virtual disk consistencyInitializing virtual disksEncrypting virtual disksAssigning or unassigning dedicated hot sparesManaging virtual disks using web interfaceManaging virtual disks using RACADMCreating virtual disksTo implement RAID functions, you must create a virtual disk. A virtual disk refers to storage created by a RAID controller from oneor more physical disks. Although a virtual disk may be created from several physical disks, it is seen by the operating system as asingle 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 theServer Control user privilege. You can create a maximum of 64 virtual drives and a maximum of 16 virtual drives in the same drivegroup.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 virtualdisk 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 theselected 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 thejob 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 .NOTE: If you create a virtual disk in Add to Pending Operation mode and a job is not created, and then if you delete theVirtual disk, then the create pending operation for the virtual disk is cleared.Considerations before creating virtual disksBefore 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. Thismeans that if you reboot using a different operating system, the new operating system may rename the virtual disk using its ownnaming conventions.• Disk grouping is a logical grouping of disks attached to a RAID controller on which one or more virtual disks are created, suchthat all virtual disks in the disk group use all of the physical disks in the disk group. The current implementation supports theblocking 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 thecontroller. When creating a virtual disk, controllers support a certain number of stripes and spans (methods for combining thestorage on physical disks). Because the number of total stripes and spans is limited, the number of physical disks that can beused is also limited. The limitations on stripes and spans affect the RAID levels as follows:198
