Adding to a RAID array

Question

Greetings

Not a Dell aficionado by any means but trying to work through this. Pardon my ignorance of things Dell

Running a Dell R810 Series II with iDRAC6, ESXi 6.7u3

Previously we were running 4 x 1TB drives in a RAID-5 array. We added two additional drives and now want to use them to expand the existing RAID-5 array. We tried to do this through the PERC H700 BIOS but couldn't find any way to do this.

Then we tried to install and use OMSA and then eventually we tried to use OMIVV

Been trying for three days to get this job done and getting pretty much nowhere.

We have 25+ VMs running a mixture of Linux and Windows Server. We have the environment set up as VCenter > DC > Cluster >Host

in OMIVV when we try to run the configuration (Host Credential Profile) we enter the vCentre Server IP address followed by the iDRAC credentials and host credentials (not using AD). We then get presented with the selection of the Host which does not show the host. We see the vCentre IP, the DC and the cluster but no host to select.

Anyone have any idea where we might be going wrong?

Thanks and Regards

Nigel.

DELL-Joey C · Answer

Hi,

I have a glance through OMIVV user guide and I don't think it can do RAID controller configuration. I would suggest to install and use OMSA: https://dell.to/3d06Thk;

I've checked that H700 has online capacity expansion capability page 31: https://dell.to/3zIH6Ul.

After you have access to OMSA, you can do OCE. Here a reference: https://dell.to/3xEb4Hl

Prosmart · Answer

Thanks for that Joey

Issue is that we have not been able to get a connection from the WIndows VM using OMSA.

We enter the IP address of the ESXi box and the credentials for the root account and we get "Verifying Credentials" for 20 seconds or so and then "Login Failed - Connection Timeout". It's almost as if the server side software was not responding. Have checked the credentials and they are correct. Is there any other way of testing the connection to make sure the server is listening?

We're getting very close to backing up all the VMs externally and trashing the current RAID-5 array just to add two drives. In over 40 years of IT I have never worked on a system that makes it so hard to add a couple of disks.

Rgds

N/

DELL-Joey C · Answer

Hi Nigel,   Try installing accessing ESXi host OMSA from outside the system with the OMSA software installed.   Here's an old post: Solved: OMSA in a ESXi host - Dell Community

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Adding to a RAID array

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