Checking the entire inventory of Cisco UCS C220 M3S and expanding the hard-drive data-store on Vmware

[Sarg .]

Hello Gang,

I am new to DC so I have a few newbie questions:

I have a Cisco UCS C220 server.  Using the GUI,  I can see that I have a  an LSI Mega Raid SAS 9271-8i raid controller in slot two. The controller currently has four   464.7 GB  hard drives connected; The raid configuration is ‘ Raid 10’.  I currently have CWMS running on the server in a Wmware environment  and I want to increase the VMWare data-store (hard-drive space) by added extra hard-drives. 

1)  However, the server is located remotely and I know that the UCS C220 can either be the type that supports eight or four hard-drives. so my question is, how do remotely determine how many hard-drive bays my UCS c220 has? And also, how can I determine if there is another raid controller on the server apart from the one that I am seeing?

2) I currently have  4  464.7 GB  ATA, SATA hard-drives. I am thinking about buying four extra hard-drives which will be 1TB hard-drives each. My questions is, is my plan supported? And also, all I have to do is add the hard-drives to the server and the raid should automatically add them the other hard-drives in the raid and expand my data Store?

Thanks 

Serenity. 

[Manuel Velasco · Accepted solution]

Hi Serenity,

The easiest  way to determine how many hard drive slot you have available in that server is by:

1)Browse to the CIMP ip

2)Click on the Server tab

3) Under the server tab select "Sensors"

4) After you select the sensor option to the right you will see a set of tabs, select  "Storage"

There you will see how many hard disk slots you have available, if you have the small form factor of this server you will see that there are 4 slots showing as "Present" and 4 slots showing as "Absent"

See attached screenshot (storage-slots).

The c220 can only support 1 raid controller it comes with an embedded controller but if you have a pci base like the 9271 this cannot be use. Note that your controller can support up 8 drives in this server so you don't have to get another controller. (see spec sheet below)

http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-c-series-rack-servers/C220M3_SFF_SpecSheet.pdf

Now for your last question:

If you have additional slots and you get 1TB drives. The system won't add the new drives into the exiting raid 10 volume, this is something that needs to be done manually. Not only that because of the size difference if you are able to add these 1TB drives only 464.7 GB will be use as you can't use different size hard disk on a raid volume.  At this point I would recommend that you add these drives on a separate raid volume instead of trying to expand the exiting one.

If you need assistance creating a raid volume, please see link below

http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public/MegaRAID%20Common%20Files/51530-00_RevF.pdf

Please let me know if this was useful.

[Sarg .]

Thanks for the very  detailed information. I noticed that you mentioned that I can only use the embedded RAID controller and that I am not using my LSI Mega Raid SAS 9271-8i. However, in the attached screenshot,  it shows that I am using the RAID controller or am I missing something?

Also, how do I check / verify this other embedded Raid controller. Is this embedded RAID controller a software RAID?

Thanks 

Serenity

[Manuel Velasco]

Sorry I didn't mean to say that you can only use the embedded controller. I meant to say that you can use only one, the embedded or the PCI based controller. You can't use both. And yes the embedded is also known as software

[Sarg .]

Really Enjoyed talking to you. 

Cheers