Creating Virtual Disks

Does my controller support this feature? See Supported features.

WARNING: There is an automatic initialization in the background which starts and if there are some user data it is erased.

In order to implement RAID functions, you must create a virtual disk. A virtual disk refers to storage created by a RAID controller from one or more physical disks. Although a virtual disk may be created from several physical disks, it is seen by the operating system as a single disk.

Before creating a virtual disk, you should be familiar with the information in Considerations before creating Virtual Disks.

Storage Management provides wizards to help you create a virtual disk:

  • The Create Virtual Disk Express Wizard calculates an appropriate virtual disk layout based on the available space and controller considerations. Using this wizard, you can quickly create a virtual disk using recommended selections.
  • The Create Virtual Disk Advanced Wizard allows you to specify the read, write, and cache policy for the virtual disk. You can also select the physical disks and the controller connector to be used. You need a good knowledge of RAID levels and hardware to use the advanced wizard.
NOTE: Creating many sliced span virtual disks using the spundown drives through the command line or UI result may be delayed. After creating one sliced span virtual disk, wait for some time to create the next sliced span virtual disk.
NOTE: When you create virtual disks by using standby (spun-down) physical devices, the following message is displayed: The task cannot be completed. The VD creation task is completed but the OS may not be aware of the new VDs. However, the virtual disk is available for all operations on rebooting the system.
NOTE: When one or more virtual disks are deleted from a maximum of 64 virtual disks, you cannot create a virtual disk within a minimum duration of two minutes. The following error message is displayed: Unable to complete the operation. Retry the operation after few minutes in the Information/Configuration page. To create a virtual disk, it is recommended to wait for a minimum duration of two minutes.
NOTE: When you select SAS or SATA as Bus Protocol on the Create Virtual Disk Wizard (Step1) page, and if HDD or SSD media type is not available on PowerEdge servers, then the corresponding Media Type that is unavailable is not disabled in the Media drop-down list.
NOTE: On PERC 12 controllers, when you create a partial virtual disk using RAID 50 or 60 level from CLI, the physical disks must be specified in the order of spans of the parent virtual disk. To create a partial virtual disk, run the following command: omconfig storage controller <controler ID> action-createvdisk size-<n> raid-<r50/r60> pdisk-<physical disks ID> stripezise-<size> spanlength-<span length>, where the value of <n> must be minimum of 0.1 GB.