I am a little confused in this description, does this 1:0:4
interprets to Controller1, Disk4. Does
this integrated raid card have two
controllers coming out of it ?
I think that it is still technically one controller. EDIT: @techieb0y has the right answer to this part of the question below.
Also, When I first switched on the
machine, the boot partition was
showing 1GB Available out of 40GB, now
its showing 38GB available out of
40GB.
Is this because the Virtual Disks are
still Initializing ?
Yes.
Any
recommendations or suggestions ?
Wait until they are finished initializing.
Also, this server have 6 x 500GB
NearLine SAS Hard drives, what would
be a good raid config ?
This really depends on your needs, and I am sure there are many threads here on ServerFault that talk about the benefits and drawbacks of various RAID configurations in various scenarios. What is most important to you? Safety? Speed? Maximum volume? When I'm in doubt, I usually stick with a RAID5, cause it offers a good combination of performance and safety.
We are planning to use it for Hyper-V
with quite a few (7 or 8) virtual
servers, your suggestions would be
helpful.
Depending on how much RAM and CPU you have, and depending on what you are doing with these systems, that might not be that many at all. I've run as many as 30 simultaneous VMs on my similarly spec'd hosts (although running VMware ESX and not Hyper-V). But those VMs have all been "light-duty" machines that aren't heavily utilized.
Also, while the virtual disks are in a
initialization state, can I destroy
and re-create the raid configuration ?
Yes, I've done this many times on my R710s with no ill-effects. Just make sure you do a new initialization before using them.
I would have to do it at the BIOS
CTRL-M ?
Yes, as far as I know, this is the only way to do it. There might be others though, I haven't looked for any alternatives.
Hope this helps. Good luck,
--jed
Best Answer
You need to chain the shelves together in order to span a disk between them. (Well at least you could with the 3000 and 3200 series I think.
Windows storage spaces might help you get there. Rather than having two controller shelves, it is more common to have a single controller shelf such as the MD3400 and extra shelves attached to it via SAS. That ways its all one logical entity to connected hosts.