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
The R5400 is just a workstation in a rack mount case. Windows 7 is fully supported by Dell and they offer drivers for both x86 and x64 versions.
The R710 isn't explicitly supported by Dell with Windows 7, but its very likely that the 2008 R2 drivers will work just fine under x64 Win7. The 2008 x86 drivers will also probably work with the x86 version.
Best Answer
I just googled the Quadro 6000-series to see what it was and my jaw dropped. I understand why you're not keen on forking out for it!
The Windows 7 drivers should install on Windows 2008 just fine, if they are signed. Now that 2008 R2 actually requires a high-end graphics card for some of its fancy new Hyper-V features, you'll find full support (I assume you're using 2008 R2, but you only mentioned 2008, but the drivers will still work).
I suspect that Dell might use it as an excuse for not supporting the installation, so if you have any issues your first point of call would be to remove the graphics card.
Apart from the issue of it being officially "unsupported", you shouldn't have any troubles. Dell have a bit of a history of going out of their way to provide PCI-e expansion (The M610x blade for example) so it would be highly unusual if you had any issues.