Adding Second Raid 5 Drive from iDrac 8

 

I have a dell R730xd server with an iDrac8 with a PERC H730P mini Raid Controller with 2GB of
cache.

 

I have a raid 5 already with 4 disk running.  I have 3 more disks I want to turn into a second raid 5 drive that can then be mounted in the Ubuntu 26.04 running on the first raid.  I want to see how this is done from the iDrac8 web page.

 

 

My Current status

After logging into the iDrac8 web page open up Overview à Storage à Physical Disk

 

I can see my 3 extra disks that are “Non-RAID”

 

 

Get the disks Ready

 

 

Click on Setup

 

Use the pull down and select Convert to RAID

 

 

Click OK

 

 

Click Apply.

 

 

Go to the Job Queue.

 

 

Watch its status.  (click refresh button in upper right)
Once it reaches 100% go to the next step.

 

 

Now they are all set to Ready.

 

Create Virtual Drive

 

 

Go to Overview à Storage à Virtual Drives

Click Create

 

 

Give it a name and select RAID-5

 

 

Select HDD

 

 

Choose the Disks to add to the Virtual Drive.
Click Create Virtual Drive.

 

 

Go to the Job Queue

 

 

Wait till it hits 100% until going to the next step.

 

 

Mounting the new drive

 

After logging into Ubuntu run the following command.

> lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,TYPE,FSTYPE,LABEL,MOUNTPOINT,MODEL,SERIAL

 

I can see the new second Raid-5 Drive is at sdc

Let’s confirm it with the perccli tool

First install the tools (if you do not have them)

> cd /tmp   > wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/128.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" \   -O PERCCLI_7.3208.0_Linux_A01.tar.gz \ "https://dl.dell.com/FOLDER13074167M/1/PERCCLI_7.3208.0_Linux_A01.tar.gz"    > tar xzvf PERCCLI_7.3208.0_Linux_A01.tar.gz   > sudo dpkg -i "$(find . -iname 'perccli*.deb' -print -quit)"

 

 

Create a symlink to make your life easier.

> sudo ln -fs /opt/MegaRAID/perccli/perccli64 /usr/local/bin/perccli

Now run.

> sudo /opt/MegaRAID/perccli/perccli64 /c0/vall show all

 

Now let’s partition it and format it

> sudo parted /dev/sdc --script mklabel gpt   > sudo parted /dev/sdc --script mkpart primary 0% 100%   > sudo parted /dev/sdc --script set 1 lvm on   > sudo partprobe /dev/sdc    > sudo pvcreate /dev/sdc1   > sudo vgcreate vg_second /dev/sdc1   > sudo lvcreate -l 100%FREE -n lv_data vg_second    > sudo mkfs.ext4 -L Second_raid5 /dev/vg_second/lv_data   > sudo mkdir -p /mnt/second_raid5   > sudo mount /dev/vg_second/lv_data /mnt/second_raid5

 

Now let’s see if its there.

> df -h /mnt/second_raid5

 

But this won’t survive a reboot.  Let me add it to /etc/fstab

Get the UUID

> sudo blkid /dev/vg_second/lv_data

In my case UUID="557d406e-d3bf-43c0-bb6c-a66f80365e76"

Now open /etc/fstab

> sudo vi /etc/fstab

Now add this line at the end

> sudo vi /etc/fstab

Add this (adjust for your UUID)

UUID=557d406e-d3bf-43c0-bb6c-a66f80365e76 /mnt/second_raid5  ext4  defaults,nofail  0  2

 

Save it

To test it I am going to reboot and make sure it mounts.

> sudo reboot now

Log back in and run

> df -h /mnt/second_raid5

 

Looks good!

 

References