2.4 KiB
Dell PERC Hardware RAID Controllers
The Dell PERC (PowerEdge RAID Controller) line is a series of LSI cards flashed with Dell-custom firmware. I run two different models of PERC:
- Dell PERC H310
- One in each of the PowerEdge R410's
- Dell PERC H200 *One in the PowerEdge R210
The H310 supports up to eight physical SAS6/SATA3 disks and has Dell's "large disk support" (meaning supporting drives over 2.6TB). It supports RAID configurations 0, 1, 5, and 10. It also supports non-RAID SAS/SATA passthrough.
The H200 supports up to four physical SAS6/SATA3 disks and does not support "large" disks; each physical disk is capped at 2.6TB. It supports RAID configurations 0, 1, and 5.
Working with CentOS 8
I'm not a fancy guy. I don't need the fastest, sleekest, coolest computer on the block. At the time of this writing (2019) my R410s and R210 are like a trusty '97 Toyota Tacoma (or Carolla, for the R210). They don't have a lot of bells and whistles, but I don't need them to and they work fine for what I need.
But I do like new software. And more importantly, I like supported software and the security updates it brings with it. So during my most recent rebuild of my homelab I figured I'd bump all three servers from CentOS 7.5 to the newly released CentOS 8 and then forget about updates until 2029.
Unfortunately Red Hat decided to drop the drivers that support these perfectly good RAID cards from Cent8. Here's how to make it work:
!!! note Ensure the BIOS and RAID settings are configured properly before continuing. Optionally boot into a CentOS 7.x live image to verify everything is setup properly
Find RAID Card PCI ID
- Burn a bootable CentOS installation live ISO to a USB drive (or CD if you're feeling old school)
- Boot the target device off of the live image
- Once the GUI installer is presented, press
Ctrl+Alt+F5
to switch to a different TTY session.
- You should be presented with a
root@anaconda
terminal prompt.
- Enter the command
lspci -nn
and identify the RAID card from the list. It will have some combination ofLSI
,megaraid
, and/orDell PERC
in the identifier - Note the PCI ID of the RAID card
!!! note
If the RAID card is not visible in the output of lspci
then there is likely a misconfiguration or hardware fault farther down the stack than the operating system. Check your BIOS and RAID card settings.
Download Drivers