- Notes, cautions, and warnings
- About the Shared PERC 8 card
- Shared PERC
8 card features
- Physical disk power management
- Consistency Checks
- Virtual disk initialization
- Physical disk roaming
- FastPath
- Virtual disk migration
- Virtual disk cache policies
- Physical disk write cache policy
- Fault tolerance
- Multipath support
- Deploying the Shared PERC 8 card
- Driver installation
- Downloading drivers and firmware for Shared PERC 8 from the Dell support website for all operating systems
- Downloading drivers from the Dell Systems Service and Diagnostic Tools media for Windows
- Installing or updating Windows drivers for Shared PERC 8
- Installing or updating Linux drivers for Shared PERC 8
- Installing or updating VMware drivers for Shared PERC 8
- Multipath and clustering setup
- Management applications for Shared PERC 8 card
- Troubleshooting
- Performance variations between write-back and write-through cache modes
- Shared PERC 8 card boots into safe mode
- Degraded state of virtual disks
- General issues
- Physical disk
issues
- Incorrect Number of Virtual Disks Displayed In Windows Disk Manager
- Physical Disk In Failed State
- Unable to rebuild a fault tolerant virtual disk
- Fatal Error Or Data Corruption Reported
- Physical Disk Displayed As Blocked By Management Application
- Multiple Disks Become Inaccessible
- Rebuilding A Failed Physical Disk
- Virtual Disk Fails During Rebuild Using A Global Hot Spare
- Virtual Disk Fails During Rebuild Using A Dedicated Hot Spare
- Physical disk takes a long time to rebuild
- Controller cache issues
- SMART Errors
- Auto Replacement Member Errors
- Hard-Drive Indicator Patterns
- Getting help
Dell Shared PowerEdge RAID Controller (PERC) 8 For Dell PowerEdge VRTX Systems User’s Guide
Configurations of the Shared PERC 8 card
The PowerEdge VRTX system is available in two configurations of the Shared PERC 8 card:
Single Shared PERC 8 Card Configuration — In this configuration, the PowerEdge VRTX system contains a single Shared PERC 8 card. The default cache policy for virtual disks created in this configuration is write-back. In this mode, write completion information is returned to the host after the data is written to the Shared PERC 8 controller’s cache.
Fault Tolerant Shared PERC 8 Card Configuration — In this configuration, the PowerEdge VRTX system contains two Shared PERC 8 cards. The shared PERC cards are configured in an active-passive mode. Both the cards can access the storage subsystem. However, only the active controller will provide the data access. If one Shared PERC 8 card fails, the other Shared PERC 8 card takes control in a seamless transition.
Host data is also mirrored to the peer controller's cache to allow the peer controller to take over operations in the event of a primary card failure.
Important information regarding the Fault Tolerant Shared
PERC 8 Card Configuration:
- Multipath support must be enabled in the operating system for the Fault Tolerant Shared PERC 8 card configuration to function.
- In the event of a controller failover, a Background Initialization (BGI) starts automatically on each virtual disk.
- An ongoing full initialization does not restart in the event of a failover.
- Checkpoints are created for all background operations. After a failover, operations are restored from the last checkpoint.
- The default cache policy for virtual disks created in this configuration is write-back. In this mode, write completion information is returned to the host after the data is written to the peer shared PERC 8 controller’s cache.
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