Dell UCPM-800 manual

Dell Shared PowerEdge RAID Controller (PERC) 8 For Dell PowerEdge VRTX Systems User’s Guide Regulatory Model: UCPM-800[...]

Notes, Cautions, and Warnings NOTE: A NOTE indicates important information that helps you make better use of your computer. CAUTION: A CAUTION indicates either potential damage to hardware or loss of data and tells you how to avoid the problem. WARNING: A WARNING indicates a potential for property damage, personal injury, or death. Copyright © 201[...]

Contents 1 About The Shared PERC 8 Card.......................................................................... 6 Configurations of the Shared PERC 8 card .......................................................................................... 6 Specifications of a Shared PERC 8 card .............................................................[...]

Shared PERC 8 Card Cache Preservation ..................................................................................... 19 Battery Transparent Learn Cycle .................................................................................................. 20 The Controller Failover Feature .........................................................[...]

Physical Disk In Failed State .......................................................................................................... 33 Unable to rebuild a fault tolerant virtual disk ............................................................................... 33 Fatal Error Or Data Corruption Reported .......................................[...]

1 About The Shared PERC 8 Card The Dell Shared PowerEdge RAID Controller (PERC) 8 card installed on the Dell PowerEdge VRTX system supports Single Root Input Output Virtualization (SR-IOV). This feature allows multiple systems to share available hardware resources. The PERC 8 card allows four server modules to access a local shared storage. Each se[...]

• Currently, Linux drivers do not support the fault tolerance feature of the PowerEdge VRTX system. Host servers running Linux are only supported in single-controller configuration. Specifications of a Shared PERC 8 card The characteristics of a Shared PERC 8 card are as follows: Table 1. Shared PERC 8 card specifications Specification Descriptio[...]

Specification Description Maximum number of spans per disk group 8 Maximum number of virtual disks per disk group 16 Maximum number of virtual disks 64 Dedicated and global hot spares Yes Hot swap devices supported Yes Hardware XOR engine Yes Virtual disk initialization; background, full, and fast Yes Consistency check Yes Disk roaming Yes FastPath[...]

Specification Description Multipath support Required for systems with Fault Tolerant Shared PERC 8 card configuration. NOTE: Multipath is not supported on systems running Linux operating system. Controller failover Available only for systems with Fault Tolerant Shared PERC 8 card configuration. Supported Operating Systems The Shared PERC 8 card sup[...]

• The PowerEdge VRTX Storage Subsystem Compatibility Matrix provides information on the minimum driver and firmware requirements for the components of the Dell PowerEdge VRTX storage subsystem. • The setup placemat shipped with your system provides information on the initial system setup and configuration. • The server module Owner's Man[...]

or Dell product catalog. Availability varies by country and product, and some services may not be available in your area. To contact Dell for sales, technical support, or customer-service issues: 1. Go to dell.com/support . 2. Select your country from the drop-down menu on the bottom right corner of the page. 3. For customized support: a. Enter you[...]

2 Shared PERC 8 Card Features Some of the features of the Shared PERC 8 card are as follows: • Physical disk power management • Consistency checks • Virtual disk initialization • Disk roaming • FastPath • Virtual disk migration • Virtual disk cache policies • Fault tolerance • Patrol read • Multipath support Physical Disk Power [...]

Background Initialization Of Virtual Disks Both Consistency Check (CC) and Background Initialization (BGI) correct parity errors. However, CC reports data inconsistencies through an event notification, whereas BGI is an automatic process. BGI does not run on RAID 0 virtual disks. You cannot disable BGI permanently. If you cancel BGI, it automatical[...]

Using Physical Disk Roaming Perform the following steps to use disk roaming: 1. Turn off the power to the system, physical disks, enclosures, and system components. 2. Disconnect power cables from the system. 3. Move the physical disks to the required positions on the backplane or the enclosure. 4. Perform a safety check. Make sure the physical dis[...]

• Does not support migration from any other PERC cards such as PERC H310, H700, H710, H800, and H810. • Supports migration of virtual disks from the Single Shared PERC 8 card configuration to the Fault Tolerant Shared PERC 8 card configuration, but does not support migration from a newer firmware version to an older firmware version system. •[...]

Virtual Disk Write Cache Policies The write cache policy of a virtual disk determines how the controller handles writes to the virtual disk. Write-Back and Write-Through are the two write cache policies that can be set on virtual disks individually. All RAID volumes are presented as Write-Through to the operating system independent of the actual wr[...]

NOTE: If the virtual drives are created with write-through as selected mode, make sure that the virtual drives are changed to write-back mode. Conditions under which write-through is employed Write-through caching is used under conditions in which the battery fails or is not present. Virtual Disk Read Cache Policies The read policy of a virtual dis[...]

• Support for controller failover in systems with Fault Tolerant Shared PERC 8 card configuration. The following sections describe some methods to achieve fault tolerance. The SMART Feature The SMART feature monitors certain physical aspects of all motors, heads, and physical disk electronics to help detect predictable physical disk failures. Dat[...]

Physical disk failure detection Failed physical disks are detected and rebuilds automatically start to new disks that are inserted into the same slot. Automatic rebuilds can also occur with hot spares. If you have configured hot spares, the controllers automatically try to use them to rebuild failed physical disks. Physical Disk Hot Swapping NOTE: [...]

Recovering cache data If a system power loss or improper system shutdown has occurred: 1. Ensure all online physical disks are still connected. 2. Restore the system power. 3. Boot the system. Virtual disks are automatically imported and preserved cache (if any) will be flushed to the physical disks of appropriate virtual disks. If preserved cache [...]

Multipath Support Multipathing solutions use redundant physical path components such as adapters, cables, and switches to create logical paths between the server and the storage device. In the event that one or more of these components fails, multipathing logic uses an alternate path for I/O so that applications can still access their data. In the [...]

3 Deploying The Shared PERC 8 Card Follow the documentation in this section to remove or install a Shared PERC 8 card under different scenarios. Installing A New Shared PERC 8 Card For information on how to install a Shared PERC 8 card, see Installing The Shared PERC 8 Card . For information on the post-installation tasks, see Post-Installation Tas[...]

Prerequisites For Removing The Shared PERC 8 Card CAUTION: Many repairs may only be done by a certified service technician. You should only perform troubleshooting and simple repairs as authorized in your product documentation, or as directed by the online or telephone service and support team. Damage due to servicing that is not authorized by Dell[...]

To remove the Shared PERC 8 card: 1. Push down the two release levers at the edge of the Shared PERC 8 card to disengage the card from the storage-controller card holder. 2. Orient the card so that the other end of the card disengages from the storage-controller card holder on the system board. CAUTION: When removing or replacing the Shared PERC 8 [...]

Installing The Shared PERC 8 Card CAUTION: Many repairs may only be done by a certified service technician. You should only perform troubleshooting and simple repairs as authorized in your product documentation, or as directed by the online or telephone service and support team. Damage due to servicing that is not authorized by Dell is not covered [...]

Firmware installation or update The VRTX storage subsystem comprises of Shared PERC firmware, drivers, Chassis Infrastructure firmware and the CMC. When updating any of these components, make sure that all the component versions are at a compatible baseline. NOTE: For more information, see the PowerEdge VRTX Storage Subsystem Compatibility Matrix a[...]

4 Driver Installation The Dell Shared PowerEdge RAID Controller (PERC) 8 card requires software drivers to operate with the supported operating systems. This chapter contains the procedures for installing the drivers for the Shared PERC 8 card. NOTE: To check operating system compatibility, see dell.com/ossupport . NOTE: Shared PERC 8 does not supp[...]

For the list of supported operating systems, see Supported Operating Systems . 3. Click Continue . 4. From the list of drivers displayed, select the driver you require. 5. Select the self-extracting zip file and click Run . 6. Copy the driver to a diskette drive, CD, DVD, or USB drive. Repeat this step for all the drivers you require. 7. During the[...]

NOTE: Dell provides the Dell Update Package (DUP) to update drivers on systems running Windows Server 2012/2012 R2 or Window Server 2008/2008 R2 operating systems. DUP is an executable application that updates drivers for specific devices. DUP supports command line interface and silent execution. For more information, see dell.com/support . Install[...]

5 Management Applications For Shared PERC 8 Card The Dell Chassis Management Controller (CMC) enables you to: • Configure the shared RAID system • Create and manage multiple disk groups • Control and monitor multiple RAID systems • Provide online maintenance through a web interface or Command Line Interface (CLI) NOTE: Dell OpenManage Stora[...]

6 Troubleshooting To get help with your Dell Shared PowerEdge RAID Controller Shared (PERC) 8 card, you can contact your Dell Technical Service representative or see dell.com/contactdell . Performance variations between write-back and write- through cache modes Performance is highly variable across configurations, drive type, applications and IO wo[...]

Category Event Reported To the CMC Description of the Failure Corrective Action Critical Error during boot - NVDATA image is invalid - reflash NVDATA image The NVData image is invalid. Contact Dell Technical Support. Degraded State Of Virtual Disks A redundant virtual disk is in a degraded state when one or more physical disks have failed or are in[...]

Warning event: Event 153, Disk The IO operation at logical block address xxxxxx for Disk x was retried referring to the PercSAS2 driver is seen in the Windows Event log . Corrective Action: These error messages may be triggered under some non-critical cases. See the system status and the CMC logs to identify any persistent failures. NOTE: Event 153[...]

Fatal Error Or Data Corruption Reported Issue: Fatal error(s) or data corruption(s) is reported when accessing virtual disks. Corrective Action: Contact Dell Technical Support. Physical Disk Displayed As Blocked By Management Application Issue: One or more physical disks are displayed as Blocked and cannot be configured. Corrective Action: Ensure t[...]

must make sure a physical disk with enough storage in the subsystem is set as a hot spare for rebuilding the physical disk. Virtual Disk Fails During Rebuild Using A Global Hot Spare Issue: A virtual disk fails during rebuild while using a global hot spare. The global hot spare reverts to Hotspare state and the virtual disk is in Failed state. Corr[...]

Conditions Actions NOTE: Unresolved pinned cache can occur if a virtual drive goes offline for any reason while there is uncommitted cache data in memory. NOTE: Clearing pinned cache means that the pinned data is lost. During a Shared PERC firmware flash, virtual drive transitions to write-through until chassis is recycled. Allow the chassis reset [...]

SMART Error Detected On A Physical Disk In A Non-Redundant Virtual Disk Issue: A SMART error is detected on a physical disk in a non-redundant virtual disk. Corrective Action: Perform the following steps: 1. Back up your data. 2. Physically remove the physical disk that detected the SMART error. NOTE: The virtual disk will be in a Failed state afte[...]

Hard-Drive Indicator Patterns Figure 2. Hard-Drive Indicators 1. hard-drive activity indicator (green) 2. hard-drive status indicator (green and amber) Drive-Status Indicator Pattern Condition Blinks green two times per second Identifying drive or preparing for removal Off Drive ready for insertion or removal NOTE: The drive status indicator remain[...]

7 Getting help Contacting Dell Dell provides several online and telephone-based support and service options. If you do not have an active Internet connection, you can find contact information on your purchase invoice, packing slip, bill, or Dell product catalog. Availability varies by country and product, and some services may not be available in y[...]