RAID! No, not that one

Hello, blog! Been a while.

I rejoined Fortinet on the 12th of May with the FortiStack team and it's my second week at the company and already having a great time learning new things.

So, the cloud team at Fortinet had mostly worked with Dell servers but now they're trying out MSI servers.

The particular server that I'm evaluating for production is an MSI S1205-01-10G. One of the main tasks in setting up a new server is setting up the storage RAID. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks and based on the setting writes data to multiple disks for redundancy. That way; if one of the drive fails, the data is still safe.

RAID can be setup either with a physical RAID card or by software RAID. The server that we ordered did not have the physical RAID card. This means setting up the virtual RAID.

Fig. 1 - MSI S1205-01 server

The first 2 drives of the server were populated with 2X 480G SATA SSDs.

Fig. 2 - Populated drives on the server
This is what the drive looks like:

Fig. 3 - 480GB SATA SSD

The virtual RAID that we're setting up is called vROC (Virtual RAID on CPU). In order to do this; first, I had to enable Intel Volume Management Device (VMD) 


Fig. 4 - Enabling Intel VMD

To figure out which VMD to enable; fig. 2 Port 4A/4C of the CPU0PE3 were used. Using the below diagram, the appropriate VMD were toggled.

Fig. 5 - Block Diagram

Then, the RAID was setup from Intel Virtual RAID on CPU.

Fig. 6 - Intel RAID

Normally, on something like iDRAC which is the Dell's Out of Band management tool, it's super easy to setup RAID and also mostly while ordering Dell servers; we get a Perc RAID card. It's quite interesting to learn how software RAID is setup by enabling processor level features from BIOS.

Thanks for reading! :)

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Reference:

[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/content-details/840615/intel-vroc-vmd-nvme-raid-quick-configuration-guide.html







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