How to - Add storage to Dell 2900

One customer site that I service has a Dell PowerEdge 2900 with a Perc 6/i RAID controller. The customer has been set up with Microsoft Hyper-V, and two virtual servers (Windows SBS 2003 and Windows 2003) are running on it.

More storage was requested and added. Here's how.

(3) 1TB SATA drives and Dell drive trays were purchased. The drives were installed into the trays and the trays into the server. During boot, CTRL-R is pressed to enter the RAID configuration manager. Once at the console, a VD is created by adding the drives, assigning RAID level and settings, and letting the disk initialize (a couple of hours). Helpful link if you're a novice.

Upon booting into Windows, I used an MMC console to access Disk Management and Share and Storage Management. During the configuration, I chose an MBR disk signature. This threw the disk/volume management off as the MBR doesn't work well for large disks. Thus, I had to do some "diskpart" commands in order to remove the READONLY attribute and to convert the disk to GPT. Reference

After handling those items, I went back in to Share and Storage Management, and I used the Provision action to add 1.82TB of RAID5 storage to the server.

That space will be cut into VHD (virtual hard drives) and assigned to the servers as additional storage space. Ultimately, the customer saves by making better use of their hardware and meeting their storage needs.