Background
Yesterday I needed to setup an R720 remotely and it needed a new RAID volume created. The issue was that rather than the normal Enterprise license the server had an iDRAC Express license (no remote console) so it wasn’t possible to use the normal UEFI / BIOS wizard to create the disks. Luckily a GUI isn’t required and the disks can be created quite happily with RACADM.
Local and remote
RACADM can be used locally on the server and remotely. In the examples below all commands are done from a remote workstation across the network. It is also possible to SSH to the iDRAC and execute the commands from there (or from the server OS itself it it’s already setup).
Check the presence of virtual disks by using:
In the below case the machine doesn’t have any virtual volumes yet:
If the machine had a virtual disk defined we’d see the below:
To delete an existing virtual disk:
Then schedule the job:
Reboot server to execute job:
Check the status of the job:
To view all jobs (results in a list of jobs and their status):
To create a virtual disk / volume
Help will show:
So we need the FQDD of the Controller and also the list of FQDD:s for our physical disks.
Checking our controller FQDD:
Checking our physical disks FQDD:
Example of creating the virtual disk with RAID0, write-through and no read-ahead (YES, IT’S ALL ONE LINE):
Example of creating the virtual disk with RAID0, write-back cache and read-ahead enabled (YES, IT’S ALL ONE LINE):
Schedule the job:
Restart to execute the job:
View the virtual disk once created: