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R/Evolution 2530 Getting Started Guide • March 2009
Creating Virtual Disks
Two or more disk drives can be logically combined to form a virtual disk. The
combined storage capacity can then be partitioned into volumes. RAIDar provides
both manual and automatic methods for creating virtual disks, as described in its
online help and in the
reference guide
.
As an example, the following steps use the
manual
method to create two virtual
disks with the following characteristics:
■
RAID 5, in which parity is distributed across all disk drives in the virtual disk
■
Five disk drives per virtual disk
■
One spare disk drive dedicated to each virtual disk
■
One volume per virtual disk, where the volume is not visible to data hosts
To create both virtual disks:
1. Select Manage > Virtual Disk Config > Create A Vdisk.
2. Select Manual Virtual Disk Creation.
3. Type a name for the virtual disk.
The name is case-sensitive and can include 17 characters. Allowed characters
include letters, numbers, hyphens, underscores, and spaces.
4. Select RAID 5 – Parity RAID, Parity Distributed.
5. Click Create New Virtual Disk.
6. Select five drives of the same size and type (all SAS or all SATA).
7. For the dedicated spare drive option, select Yes and click Continue.
You can add a maximum of four available drives to a redundant virtual disk (RAID
1, 3, 5, 6, 10, and 50) for use as spares. If a drive in the virtual disk fails, one of
these
vdisk spares
is automatically used to reconstruct the virtual disk. A spare drive
must have sufficient capacity to replace the smallest drive in the virtual disk. Vdisk
spares are also called
dedicated spares
.
The controller automatically uses the vdisk spare for reconstruction of the critical
virtual disk to which it belongs. The virtual disk remains in Critical status until the
parity or mirror data is completely written to the spare, at which time the virtual
