7. Select the drives to use in the virtual disk.
Only available drives are selectable. Available drives are neither in a virtual disk nor
assigned as a spare.
The minimum and maximum number of drives that you can select when creating a
virtual disk are shown in Table 3-1.
In a multi-enclosure system, for certain RAID levels you can select drives in a way
that provides some protection against enclosure failure:
RAID 1, 3, 5, or 6 – Select each drive from a different enclosure.
RAID 10 – Select the first half of the drives from one enclosure and the second
half from another enclosure. The first set is assigned to one mirror group and the
second to other mirror group, which limits the effect of an enclosure failure to
one mirror.
RAID 50 – Drives that you select consecutively are assigned to different sub-
vdisks in the virtual disk. Therefore, you can force the drives in each sub-vdisk to
be selected from different enclosures, improving the protection of each sub-vdisk
from an enclosure failure.
8. (Optional) Calculate whether the formatted virtual disk will have the capacity you
want:
a. Click Calculate Virtual Disk Size.
The results of the calculation are displayed.
b. Click OK.
If the capacity is insufficient for your application, change your drive selections
and repeat this step.
9. (Optional, but recommended) If the add dedicated spare drives option is displayed
you can reserve spares for use only by this virtual disk:
a. Set the add dedicated spares option to Yes.
The default is No.
b. Click Continue.
The Select Spare Drives page is displayed.
c. Select the check box of each drive to use as a spare in the virtual disk.
A drive has a check box if the drive is available and meets the minimum size and
type requirements of the virtual disk.
You can add four spares to a virtual disk.
