Hi, I'm Jerry. I'm with the Dell service Support Group here. And I'm here today to discuss a few things with you, one of which is going to be RAID best practices.
In addition to upgrading your firmware. First we'll start off with upgrading your firmware. One of the things you'll need to do before you begin the process is determine what firmware levels that you have and then also reasons for updating your firmware. Now, one of the reasons is the security concerns is the biggest reason that you want to go out and do a firmware upgrade.
Also, another reason is to improve the stability or being able to recover if you have an outage on that server. Today we're going to go ahead and get started here, taking a look at our server administrator to determine what levels of firmware that we have in here.
Some companies don't run this utility on the servers there, but if you do need to determine what levels you have, you can actually go ahead and download the update package, and I'll show you a little bit about that in a moment. And that will help you determine what levels you have.
But from the server administrator, within here, you can go in, and on the left-hand side here, there is a storage feature that's incorporated. Of course, from here, we can go in and click on that. And this will present our RAID controller. In this unit here, we're working on a 1950 today.
It has the PERC 5/i integrated adapter inside of here. Now, you want to determine that level. Of course, over here on the left-hand side is a category for firmware and driver. You can click on that, and that will give you the version of the firmware as well as the driver. Here, as you can see, we've got a 5.01 and also a 1.8 for the driver version.
We're going to need to perform updates with that. Now, in order to do so, one of the ways on a Windows-based system is to navigate out to our support.dell.com site. From there, you can obtain the package for the update. For updating the firmware as well as the driver, you'll need to navigate out to the support.dell.com site. I've already been out here, so I brought the page up, and we're at where we need to be.
Normally what you'll do is use the server service tag, or you can profile it by the model and then go to the available downloads to pull down the package that you need. The one we're going to use today is the update package for Microsoft Windows, and as you can see here, this is subject to change from time to time.
But we're going to pull this one down and do an installation for it. Okay. There we go. We'll get this started here. And we're going to run that from the current location. Now, if you have multiple servers on your network, you may want to go ahead and just save this to a network share, and then from that point you'll be able to go out and grab it instead of having to navigate to the support site frequently to download it on each one.
So we'll go ahead and run this one. And as you can see here, as I mentioned earlier on, as a prerequisite checker that's built into this one that actually helps determine your level of firmware that you have on there. As you can see here, the install package version is a little bit older than the current version that's being presented.
So we can go ahead and say yes to this. Now, as you do these updates, you want to make sure that you plan for the outage. This server does require a reboot after the firmware and the driver are applied to it. There's a couple of different ways you can look at it, one of which is the unplanned. That's going to be a critical update.
That's something that we've contacted you about or you've gone out to the website on a periodic basis and discovered that there's a critical insignia along with this. So from that point, you want to do that update. That's the unplanned section. Now, the planned, which would be a routine maintenance schedule that you go out and do your updates, and you have scheduled downtime for that.
The impact on the users will -- the impact on the servers performance at that point will be minimal. Now, as you can see here, this package completed. It didn't take very long to go through, about 25 seconds. Sometimes it ranges a little bit higher, depending on the current firmware levels. But this one completed.
I did say no to the end of that wizard there because I didn't want to reboot just yet. I want to go ahead and run my driver update, and you can stack these updates together. I've already navigated as well out to the support site to obtain this package, and you'll run it in the exact same manner that you did the firmware updates.
And we will -- as I mentioned, you can save this as well for multiple servers on a network share, but we're going to run this from current location. We'll Continue. Click on Install. Now, as you saw a moment ago with the firmware, it also shows that this version is older that we have on the server that's current.
We're going to say yes to this. And their update runs. As you can see, it doesn't take very long. So the next thing to do here is to go ahead and say yes to the reboot. We'll come back in in a moment and check to see what our firmware levels are or have been updated to. Okay.
Now that our server's back up, let's go ahead and log in. One of the main reasons why you want to do an update to the server here for the controllers is for security reasons. Also, advanced performance features within that firmware update. And also, you know, we may recommend that you do these things in order to correct a problem with an application or, you know, a piece of -- newly added piece of hardware.
Now, we're going to go ahead and open up our server administrator from this point and check the firmware levels that we've just updated. And, of course, we'll log right into this here. And we will go over to the storage section here. Click on your RAID controller. And then Firmware.
Now, you can confirm that your firmware levels have been updated. And as you can see here, we're up at a 1.21 as well as a 5.03 version. We're going to go and start to cover our virtual disk best practices as well. Now, maintaining your virtual disk should be something done that's scheduled for a monthly routine.
Running a consistency check on your virtual disk on a monthly basis is -- will help improve the performance as well as protect the integrity of the RAID volume. Now, in order to perform this, there's a couple of different ways you can do it. One of which you'll go inside the server administrator here and click on the virtual disk over here to the left-hand side.
From this point, you can go here, and you'll see that there is a window for Available Tasks. Click on the drop down arrow beside that. And then select the Check Consistency. You can go ahead and start this by clicking the Execute button, and this will begin. As you can see here, the progress to the right-hand side will show zero percent complete.
With the new controllers here, it shouldn't take very long to run, depending on the slot drive size. Normally a consistency check will run for about an hour if you have, say, for instance, 73 gigabyte hard drives installed. Bigger drives equal more time. Now, this is running, and, of course, as I mentioned, the reasons why you want ed to do this is to help the stability of the RAID volume in addition to warding off any bad problems that come along.
Within this RAID controller here also is a feature of the Patrol Read. The Patrol Read actually goes out and checks the sectors on the physical disk, which will help find bad blocks and sectors, remap them over. Of course, it doesn't affect the parity of the striping within those blocks. So basically, this is just a disk maintenance utility built into the RAID controller feature. I wanted to cover one other thing with you.
If you wanted to modify the rate that your consistency check runs, simply click on your PERC controller. From here, go to your Information and Configuration tab. From that point, go down. And under here, you're going to see Available Tasks as well for the controller. Simply press Enter on that.
Execute. And from that point, you'll be able to modify that RAID. So in summary, we've covered the updating through the Windows packaged updates as well as the consistency check for our virtual disk, which would be the best practices portion here. I thank you for your time. Have yourself a great day.
