Tutorial - Raid setup on Dell - R710 using PERC H700 card

I embarked on a building a test Hyper-V machine and debated a lot on what an optimal Raid configuration should be. After much thought I decided to go with  RAID 1 for the OS and RAID 10 for the data store drive on which I will be running my VM's.

The RAID card I have is PERC H700 card but the same can be applied to  PERC 6/i Integrated card as well.

H/W info - 6 bays

0 and 1 - 180 GB disks, OS, RAID 1
2,3,4,5 - 500 GB disks, DataStore, RAID 10

Launch the config utility - by pressing Ctrl+R

This utility will have three TABs on the top.

• VD Mgmt – Virtual Disk Management, which will be selected by default.
• PD Mgmt – Physical Disk Management
• Ctrl Mgmt – Controller Management

If this is brand new setup you will see "No configuration present" if you are re-purposing an inherited H/W you might see the older setup. Please backup the data before you wipe out the existing configuration. Also the physical disks are displayed in the raw format.

When the new virtual disk VD creation is initiated you can see the below screen with the following options for Virtual Disk Management - 

• RAID Level
• PD Per Scan
• Secure VD
• Physical Disks Section

Basic Settings

• VD Size
• VD Name

Advanced Settings

• Stripe Element Size
• Read Policy
• Write Policy
• Force WB with no battery
• Initialize
• Configure Hot Spare

Chose RAID option - 

• RAID-0
• RAID-1
• RAID-5
• RAID-6
• RAID-10
• RAID-50

Press TAB to select the next option, Disk selection

Name the VD group  in my case its HyperV_OS and VM_DataStore.

I would recommend leaving all the advanced settings to the default values. if you want to config a spare go ahead and select that option.

• Stripe Element Size – Default value is 64KB
• Read Policy – Default value is Adaptive R
• Write Policy – Default Value is “Write Back”

By default, following values are not checked. i.e check-box not selected

• Force WB with no battery
• Initialize
• Configure HotSpare

Press TAB to jump to OK and press enter.  You’ll get the following warning message. Click OK to continue. This will successfully create the new Virtual Disk with RAID-1 configuration.

To view the configuration select the VD label as below and hit enter. Also once the VD group is setup the initialization of the disks will begin as well.

Once the VD is created, you’ll see a new ‘Disk Group 0′ under ‘PERC H700′. There will be a progress bar next to the ‘Virtual Disk 0′ showing the progress of the initialization.

Continue to create a second VD group for VM_DataStore. Pay attention to the VD group properties (Right hand side - yellow) how they are populated which will help you down the lane to setup additional disks or RAID controllers.

Hopefully someone would find this useful.