Can't setup RAID on UCS C220 M4

[Cameron Whitehead]

I am trying to setup a new C220 M4 however the option to press <CTRL+H> to enter the RAID WebBIOS never shows up.  I also went into CIMC and the only options in their are to set up RAID 0, 1 or 10 however we are wanting to use RAID 5.  I have already tried to reseat my drives and my RAID controller.

[kashima yoshihito · Accepted solution]

Hi Cameron

Which RAID option did you buy ?

Depends on the RAID Card , You can create only RAID 0, 1, 10

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-computing/ucs-c-series-rack-servers/datasheet-listing.html

Check the document of Cisco UCS C220 M4 Rack Server Data Sheet

Cisco 12G SAS Modular RAID Controller
You can choose the Cisco 12G SAS RAID controller, which plugs into a dedicated RAID controller card slot. This RAID controller supports RAID 0, 1, 10 (without the FBWC option) and supports up to RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 6, 50, 60 (with the FBWC option).

[Cameron Whitehead]

Thanks again for helping with this Kashima.  As is probably apparent I am not a RAID expert.  I see there are two options with FBWC one with 1GB the other with 2GB.  Do you know what should be considered when selecting between the two?

[Cameron Whitehead]

So from what I can see it looks like this is just a write buffer to the RAID disk.  So it seems like you would only want more if you were doing a lot of writes.

[Kirk J]

The on-board raid is generally called software raid.  The driver is a LSI MegaRaidSR, and is not supported in VMware.  There are drivers for it for Windows and most Linux distributions, but it is not supported for Hypervisor workloads.

The option ROM utility is activated with <cntrl>+M

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/c/hw/C220M4/install/C220M4/raid.html#pgfId-1076876

As Kashima mentioned, you have some hardware raid options that include the 12Gb Modular Raid controller, with up to a 4GB supercap backed cache module.

Thanks,

Kirk..

[Cameron Whitehead]

Yea we bought the incorrect RAID controller.