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Swapping PERC RAID controller cards
We currently have two physical servers in a datacenter, (a PowerEdge R610 and a PowerEdge R815). We recently acquired four new Dell PowerEdge R610’s.
The original physical servers in the Data Center have PERC H200 RAID controllers installed. These allow for RAID 0,1,10 as options. The 4 new physical servers we have acquired all come with PERC 6/i RAID controllers; these allow for RAID 0,1,5,6,10,50,60 options.
Two of the new servers have 2 CPUs (4 cores each=8 cores total) while two of them have 1 CPU (4 cores each=4 cores total). The original servers are 1x R610 with 2 CPUs (i.e. 8 cores) and 1x R815 with 2 CPUs (16 cores each=32 cores in total).
I’d like to remove the PERC 6/I controllers from the two new R610s with only 1 CPU and install them into the original R610 & R815. This would allow us to maximize disk space and performance on the 4 servers with 2 CPUs, especially the R815 with 32 cores. And then the H200 controllers from the R610 & R815 would be installed in the 2x R610 servers with only 1 CPU.
According to the information found at http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/04/campaigns/dell-raid-controllers the 6/I uses PCI-Express 1.0 while the H200 uses PCI-Express 2.0. I’d like to know if it’s do-able to switch the PERC controller cards in the original R610 and R815 servers. Since one of the originals is an R610 and all four new servers are R610, I can assume that the PERC 6/i can be installed. What about the R815?
Can anyone offer any advice on whether or not this is a viable option, and if not why?
DELL-Chris H
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February 22nd, 2016 11:00
Jcoyne,
To start, let me clarify that the Perc 6/i isn't listed as a supported controller for the R815, while it is supported in the R610. Now with the R610, changing to the Perc 6/i is only an option if you do NOT need to retain the existing OS and data on the drives. The reason being is that you can't migrate from an H200 back to a Perc 6/i, you can migrate from a Perc 6/i to an H200. Just not vice versa as you are requesting. You can uninstall the H200 and install the Perc 6i, which would require you to create a new Virtual Disk, which you can then install the OS on and restore any backed up data back to the server.
Now with the processors, I would need a part number to tell you for certain if they are cross compatible. You could also PRIVATE MESSAGE me the svc tags of the systems.
Let me know if this helps.