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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

  1. Burn a bootable CentOS installation live ISO to a USB drive (or CD if you're feeling old school)
  2. Boot the target device off of the live image
  3. 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.
  1. Enter the command lspci -nn and identify the RAID card from the list. It will have some combination of LSI, megaraid, and/or Dell PERC in the identifier
  2. 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