Adding harddrives to iDrac Dell Server

Adding drives to iDrac involves a lot more than just plugging in the drive to the server. With server hardware there is a dedicated RAID controller that is in charge of the drives. While it is possible to not utilise raid, I want to leave it possible to integrate raid options later for parity of data. Unlike normal consumer grade computers there is a distinct difference between the physical drives that exist in the system and the virtual drives that appear to the operating systems that use the storage.

Overview of Raid Configurations

Raid 0 – Striping
Raid 1 – Mirroring
Raid 5 – Striping with Parity
Raid 6 – Striping with Double Parity
Raid 10 – Combine Striping and Striping

For now I am using Raid 0 which basically means not using raid at all. The data is only written to one disk.

Adding Drives

I am using an older version of iDrac. iDrac is the bios software that is included with certain models of Dell servers. My version is the full enterprise version that gives full control over the system. This is great except that it does not have the ability to execute the commands necessary for adding drives.

First open the Virtual Console and power cycle the system with a warm boot.

While the system is posting press F2 to go into system setup

Go to Device Settings > Integrated RAID Controller 1:Dell PERC <PERC h730 mini>

Inside the physical device management set the drive to Raid mode 0

Go to virtual disk management and make the new virtual disk

Warm boot again

Go back into F2 and back to the PERC h730

Select configuration utility and create a profile based virtual disk

Select the raid option, scroll down and Create Virtual Disk

Look back in virtual disks in iDrac and the new drive should be there

In virtual console login as root to proxmox and run the following command to force scan for new drives

$ for host in /sys/class/scsi_host/host*; do echo "- - -" > "$host/scan"; done

Then list the drives to see if it recognised the new drive

$ lsblk