Contents
1 Overview.................................................................................................................9
Supported operating systems............................................................................................................. 14
PERC card specifications.....................................................................................................................15
Management applications for PERC cards......................................................................................... 17
Comprehensive embedded management ...................................................................................17
Dell OpenManage Storage Management..................................................................................... 17
Related documentation...................................................................................................................... 18
2 Getting started with your PERC card..............................................................19
Installing the operating system and the PERC card on a base system............................................. 19
Installing the PERC card on a system with the operating system pre-installed...............................20
Installing the operating system on a system with the PERC card pre-installed............................... 21
Setting up the system with the PERC card and the operating system pre-installed .......................22
Configuring settings of a replaced PERC card on a system with operating system pre-
installed................................................................................................................................................23
3 Features................................................................................................................ 25
PERC 9 personality management.......................................................................................................25
T10 protection information................................................................................................................ 25
Enabling T10 PI..............................................................................................................................25
Disabling T10 PI.............................................................................................................................26
Secure firmware update......................................................................................................................26
Improved RAID 10 configuration........................................................................................................26
4KB block size disk drives................................................................................................................... 26
Physical disk power management......................................................................................................26
Configured spin down delay.........................................................................................................27
Types of virtual disk initialization........................................................................................................ 27
Full initialization............................................................................................................................. 27
Fast initialization............................................................................................................................28
Background initialization.................................................................................................................... 28
Consistency checks............................................................................................................................ 28
Disk roaming....................................................................................................................................... 29
Using disk roaming........................................................................................................................29
FastPath............................................................................................................................................... 29
Configuring FastPath-capable virtual disks..................................................................................29
Virtual disk migration.......................................................................................................................... 30
Migrating virtual disks....................................................................................................................30
Virtual disk write cache policies..........................................................................................................31
3