Intel S5000VSA (SAS) motherboard setup RAID steps

Intel S5000VSA (SAS) motherboard setup RAID steps

I recently personally installed a server, with the Intel S5000VSA 4DIMM motherboard, because in the installation process did not notice some details, so in the installation encountered some problems, and then after everyone's research and discussion, finally successfully solved these problems, in order to accumulate experience, Also in order to allow other colleagues to avoid the network, save time, speed up the processing of problems, so my experience is sorted out for everyone's reference.
I found on the Intel Web site on how to set up a raid animation tutorial, I encountered the problem is to see this tutorial after the solution, I will use this animation tutorial based on the Intel motherboard How to do the raid steps to say, at the same time I encountered the problem also interspersed inside to explain, And in bold words to mark out, I hope you encounter the same problem, but also pay attention to.

Boot start, press "F2" into the BIOS settings, in the "Main" option, the "Quiet boot" set to "Disabled", meaning that the "fast boot" function off, so that in the start, will appear "ctrl+e" the word, in order to enter the raid Set the interface. I did not notice this at first, so in the start, press the "ESC" key, can not see the word "ctrl+e", occasionally secondary can go in, but the overwhelming majority can not see, here delayed for a long time, so we should pay attention to this detail later.

Here is the option to set the hard drive in.

Set "SATA Mode" to "enhanced", and the following "Configure SATA as RAID" is set to "Enabled", which means to turn on the SATA raid function.

This is the set up state, set to this, press "F10" to save and exit the BIOS.
If the motherboard does not have a SAS chip, this is set up, if it is with a SAS chip, then the following settings:

The BIOS with the SAS has more of this item shown in the diagram, enter the icon to enter the SAS control.

Open the SAS control chip.

Setting the SAS RAID key to "Enabled" is to turn on the SAS Raid feature and press "F10" to save the BIOS.
After the above setup, the BIOS settings have been set up, the next task is to enter the raid settings interface to set.

When the RAID function is turned on, you can see this interface, prompting us to press "Ctrl+e" to enter the RAID setup interface.

This is the RAID setup interface.

This is an interface into the RAID setup. Use the SPACEBAR here to select the hard drive.

Press "F4" to set the hard drive to "Hotspare".

After setting, you can press ENTER to determine and press F10 to set.

To set the RAID mode, or some parameters, basically the other parameters are as follows by default.

Because there are only 2 hard drives, there are only two modes of RAID 0 and RAID 1 available in RAID mode.
The following is an example of RAID 10 with 4 hard disks.

Use the SPACEBAR to select 4 hard drives.

Select RAID mode.

Since there are 4 hard drives, the RAID mode option appears with the RAID 0,5,10 option, but RAID 5 is grayed out and not selectable. Because Intel S5000VSA cannot directly support RAID 5, to support RAID 5, another RAID 5 KEY, or RAID 5 activation chip, is purchased.

After you select RAID 10, the following options are available for the default settings.

Finally select "Accept", enter, determine the raid settings.

Press the "ESC" key to Exit to the main menu.

Select "Initialize" (initialize) to initialize the newly formed array.

Select the logical drive disk with a space, which is the array. Press "F10" to initialize.

Select "Yes" to determine initialization. After the above steps, RAID 10 is already set up.

On the Main Menu page, you can select the "Objects" key to set the raid parameters. If you select "Rebuild", you can restore the raid in an unhealthy state. Select "Check consistency" to detect consistency.

Press the "ESC" key to exit the array Setup program.

After setting up the raid, this interface appears at startup and displays a RAID 10 array.
The above is a tutorial based on Intel's official tutorial animation, which describes the normal steps of how to assemble an array. Here are some of the things we encountered in the actual operation, not mentioned in the tutorial animation, but in practical use is also a very common problem.
First, there is more than one array in the case. For example, the customer requires 3 hard drives, 2 of which do a set of arrays, RAID 0 or RAID 1, and the remaining one is used alone, not joined to the array. This time, the individual hard drive, must be in a RAID mode to add in, generally in the form of RAID 0 to do in. In other words, it is this hard disk that makes a RAID 0 alone. If this is not the case, the standalone hard drive is not recognized in the system.
The second one is that when an array is made with on-board SATA, the following interface appears in the BIOS boot entry: "ESB2 Embedded raid", which means booting from the RAID array. However, if there are 2 arrays, from the BIOS there is no way to determine from which set of arrays to boot, to determine from which set of arrays to start, to go into the raid settings interface to set the line.

The following is the set-up interface into the raid, where "Configure" > "Select Boot Drive" are used for the array selection to start

There are two sets of arrays to choose from, one is "boot drive 0" and the other is "boot
Drive 1 ". As for which array is the raid, it can be observed in other options.

As shown in, "boot drive 0" is RAID 1 with 2 hard drives, "boot drive 1" is that individual hard disk with a status of RAID 0

When you are finished, multiple sets of arrays are also displayed when you start.
Summary: Intel S5000VSA does array, focusing on the following points:
(1), the BIOS to the "Quiet Boot" set to "Disabled", otherwise there will be the boot how to press ESC can not appear "ctrl+e" word.
(2), when the SATA is a raid state, a single hard disk should also be added in the state of RAID 0, or the system will not recognize the individual hard disk.
(3), as a group of arrays, in the RAID settings interface to select the boot drive, not the motherboard bios inside.
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Raid
The Intel SAS Model Server Board (order number S5000vsasas) also has a 4-port serial-attached SCSI (SAS) dual-mode controller that supports both SAS hard drives and SATA hard drives. This controller supports data transfer rates up to 3.0 Gbps per port. The SAS controller (in RAID mode) supports eight physical drives and eight logical arrays. When using an extender, the SAS controller (in native mode) can support up to 120 physical drives.
BIOS setup Utility "Advanced" | The Mass Storage Settings page contains options for enabling or disabling the SAS option ROM and SAS controller. You must enable the two options in these options to use RAID.
1 after SAS controller is enabled, the two black SATA ports on the server board continue to be used as SATA ports. The four blue ports can be used either as SAS ports or as SATA ports. After disabling the SAS controller in the Biossetup utility, only two black SATA ports are available.
2 After you enable the SAS option ROM in the BIOS setup utility, you can use Intel Embedded server RAID Technology II. This will enable the Sasraid mode 0, 1, or 10 on the 4 blue ports on the server board. SAS controllers can be mixed with SAS drives and SATA drives.
If the SAS option ROM is disabled in the BIOS Setup utility but the SAS controller is enabled, the four blue ports on the server board can continue to act as SAS ports or SATA ports, while the two black ports on the server board will only continue to function as SATA ports. However, this support is not available unless RAID support is enabled for SATA or SAS in the BIOS.
SAS server boards can use one of the SAS and SATA controllers, or they can use both. One or two Intel RAID activation key AXXRAKSW5 can be installed, one for the SAS controller and one for the SATA controller (optional). RAID controllers can use separate configuration utilities at startup, but they share the Intel RAID Web Console 2 management utility.
Both SAS and SATA controllers support Sgpio storage device management. The SAS model has two SGPIO interfaces on the server board, one for the SAS controller and one for the SATA controller.
If RAID 5 is required, you can install the optional Intel RAID activation key AXXRAKSW5 (available after release). To enable RAID 5, this activation key can be found on the Sas_key interface on the left side of the server board. For information about how to install the Intel RAID activation key AXXRAKSW5 attachment to enable RAID 5, see the documentation that is included in the Accessories tool suite.
Intel Server Board S5000VSA (SAS) Motherboard RAID Configuration method
1. Press F2 to enter the BIOS
2. Enter advanced to set the SAS controller and Contigure SAS as SW raid to enable
3. Restart the computer press Ctrl+e to enter the RAID configuration interface, if you do not see ctrl+e generally because the boot is too fast, you can set Quik boot to disable
Intel ® Server board S5000VSA software download
Http://downloadcenter.intel.com/filter_results.aspx?strTypes=all
&ProductID=2487&OSFullName=%E6%89%80%E6%9C%89%E6%93%8D%E4%BD%9C%E7%B3%BB%E7%BB%9F&lang=zho& stross=all&submit=%e6%89%a7%e8%a1%8c%ef%bc%81

Intel S5000VSA (SAS) motherboard setup RAID steps