Here's how to identify the mirrored set each physical drive is a part of for RAID 10 arrays on PERC 9 and later series controllers, using OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) and OpenManage Command Line Interface (OMCLI).
Hello, my name is Ricky, I'm a Dell Global Support Engineer on the Platform team and today I'm going to show you how to identify mirrored sets for RAID 10 arrays using OpenManage Server Administrator.
This information pertains to PERC 9 Series controllers and above. Previously, we used the classic RAID 10, which were multiple spans of mirrored drives.
Since the PERC 9s, we have moved to a single-span implementation and this is where mirrored sets come into play. The main reasons for this change are to increase the span length beyond 32 drives and to fully utilize SSD technology for max performance.
A link to the article that shows the different families from 5 to 11 will be included in the description. Let's go ahead and open up "Server Administrator" and take a look at the physical drives we'll be looking at.
As you can see, physical drive zero is just a single-disc RAID 0, to install an operating system for the purpose of this video. The drives we're most concerned with are one, two, three, four, and five. These are the ones we'll be using to create a RAID 10 and a hot spare.
Let's go ahead and start with creating our RAID 10. I'm going to go to the "Creation Wizard", select the "Advanced Wizard", select "RAID 10", and then select "HDD", which is what drives one through five are.
On this screen, I will select drives one, two, three, and four to be part of the RAID 10 array. Give the array a name. And scroll down and here you can see the "Mirror Set ID" that is associated with each physical drive.
I'll select "drive five" to make it my hot spare, hit "Finish" and this will complete the RAID array creation. Let's click on the "RAID 10" that we just created and we can see the associated physical drives.
If I expand the properties of each physical drive, I can see the "Mirror Set ID". To expand on this a little more, I am going to simulate a failure by forcing drive one offline.
Because drive five is our hot spare, this means it will kick in to rebuild. As you can see, drive five is now rebuilding in place of drive one. The enumeration and listing of the drives looks a bit off.
Instead of one, two, three, four it is now two, five, three, four. This is because OpenManage will group the drives by "Mirror Set ID" first and then in numerical order second.
You can still identify the "Mirror Set ID" for each drive. Drive five of course, because it's taking the place of drive one, has "Mirror Set ID" zero.
We can get the same information using OpenManage command line, by typing in a simple command to output the physical disk properties we can view the "Mirror Set ID" there as well.
The output will be in numerical order regardless of the "Mirror Set ID". We scroll up and we get to "drive five" we can see it shows "Mirror Set ID" zero.
Scrolling up a little bit further to "drive four", you'll see "Mirror Set ID" one. Thank you for joining me today. For videos on various other topics, please check out the other content on the channel, and as always, thank you for choosing Dell. Have a wonderful day.