Dell R640 server

Note: We have moved contents about BIOS settings, iDRAC, and racadm to separate pages, see the main page Dell servers and storage.

This page contains information out Dell PowerEdge R640 could servers which we have deployed in our cluster.

Documentation and software

Dell Support provides R640 information:

PERC H330 RAID controller

The R640 comes with a PERC H330 RAID controller.

By default the installed disks are unallocated, and you have to configure their usage.

Press the F2 Function_key during start-up to enter the setup menus. Go to the Device Settings menu.

Configure the H330 via the menu item Device Settings and select the RAID controller item:

  • In the RAID controller Main Menu select the Configuration Management item.

  • Change the disk setup into Convert to Non-RAID.

  • In the Controller Management menu item Select Boot Device define the non-RAID disk as the boot device.

Press Finish to save all settings.

raidcfg tool

The OpenManage tool raidcfg can be installed from the above mentioned Dell EMC OpenManage Deployment Toolkit (Linux) folder /mnt/RPMs/rhel7/x86_64/:

yum install raidcfg*rpm

See raidcfg quick reference.

To list installed RAID controllers:

/opt/dell/toolkit/bin/raidcfg controller

perccli tool

The perccli tool for Linux is downloaded from the PowerEdge server’s SAS RAID downloads

Install the RPM (the version may differ):

tar xzf perccli_linux_NF8G9_A07_7.529.00.tar.gz
cd perccli_7.5-007.0529_linux/
yum install perccli-007.0529.0000.0000-1.noarch.rpm
ln -s /opt/MegaRAID/perccli/perccli64 /usr/local/bin/perccli

See the Reference Guide at https://topics-cdn.dell.com/pdf/dell-sas-hba-12gbps_reference-guide_en-us.pdf

Example command:

perccli show

Disk status

This command shows all disks for controller 1:

perccli /c1/eall/sall show

This command shows the RAID rebuild status for controller 1:

perccli /c1/eall/sall show rebuild

NVDIMM Optane persistent memory setup

Note that Intel has discontinued NVDIMM Optane persistent memory with recent processor generations as described in the Optane_EOL page. Documentation of NVDIMM Optane persistent memory:

Configuration of persistent memory in Dell PowerEdge servers is described in the manual Dell EMC PMem 200 Series User’s Guide in the server documentation:

  • To configure NVDIMM 3D_XPoint known as Intel Optane persistent memory DIMM modules go to the System BIOS Settings boot menus. Select the menu:

    Memory Settings > Persistent Memory > Intel Persistent Memory > Persistent Memory DIMM Configuration

  • Memory mode configuration for persistent memory:

    • To create an NVDIMM goal in BIOS, go to the sub-menu Create Goal Config.

    • The BIOS options determine how the goal is created and the PMems are configured:

      Operation Target: Platform - Applies the goal to all the DIMMs in the system (recommended)
Persistent [%]: 100 - Creates a goal of 100% Persistent memory across the selected PMems

Configure persistent memory namespaces

Install this package:

dnf install ndctl

and list all physical devices:

ndctl list -DHi

The configuration of namespaces will decide how much memory capacity to expose to the OS. Create a namespace on each of the persistent memory modules:

ndctl create-namespace

See the manual for ndctl-create-namespace. List namespaces:

ndctl list -N

To correlate a namespace to a PMem device, use the lsblk command.

Managing NVDIMMs with ipmctl

The ipmctl is a utility for configuring and managing Intel® Optane™ Persistent Memory modules (PMem). On EL8 systems install this package from EPEL:

dnf install ipmctl

Read the ipmctl manual page. For example, display the NVDIMM in the system:

$ ipmctl show -dimm
 DimmID | Capacity    | LockState        | HealthState | FWVersion
======================================================================
 0x0001 | 126.742 GiB | Disabled, Frozen | Healthy     | 02.02.00.1553
 0x1001 | 126.742 GiB | Disabled, Frozen | Healthy     | 02.02.00.1553

Other useful commands:

$ ipmctl help
$ ipmctl show -topology -socket