DELL PERC H200 INITIALIZING FULL SIZE

Modular means blade server version, Adapter versions are for full size PCIXpress cards, and integrated versions are for chips soldered to the main board. If you have a H200 Modular, chances are you will replace it with a H700 Modular.

Choose the corresponding H700 version.

Browse to the extracted installation package, and find the oemsetup.inf file:.

DELL PERC H200 INITIALIZING DRIVER

Chose вЂњBrowse my computer for driver softwareвЂќ.

DELL PERC H200 INITIALIZING UPDATE

Device manager, H200 properties, Driver, Update driver.

Extract the driver installation package ( /s /e=).

Replace the H200 driver with the corresponding H700 driver:.

Read the rest of this article before you continue.

In a cluster this is not as important as you can reinstall and re-add a node to without affecting the cluster as long as the other node(s) are intact, and the data is usually stored on shared SAN drives.

Make sure you have backups of anything you might need on the drives.

But if you follow this вЂњsimpleвЂќ list it should be doable. This is caused by the fact that the driver for the H200 is not compatible with the H700.

But suddenly midway through the boot, you are greeted with a BSOD. It all looks very promising, the normal boot-sequence is displayed as expected.

DELL PERC H200 INITIALIZING WINDOWS

Booting Windows is another matter altogether though. It is a simple matter of pressing вЂFвЂ™ during boot at the right moment to import the вЂњforeignвЂќ configuration. The H700 is able to import the RAID config stored on drives previously connected to a H200, provided you have all the drives and connect them the same way as on the H200. Especially if the server is in production and you donвЂ™t want to reinstall it from scratch.

H310 controllers should be replaced with H710s. Pull out the H200 controllers and replace them with H700s. Update: Test data from a H310 equipped test server doing nothing but displaying the perfmon curve: I have yet to test it, but from what the specs tell me it is just as bad as the H200. Note: The H200 is replaced by the H310 on newer servers. And it explains why the connected drives are painfully slow, you are reduced to platter speed. This sounds like something one would use in a print server or small departmental file server in a very limited budget, not in a four-way database cluster node. It has absolutely no cache whatsoever, and it also disables the built in cache on the drives.

The H200 doesnвЂ™t appear to be worth the price of the cardboard box it is delivered in. After having a look at the specs for the H200 I fully agree with their assessment, although I do wonder why on earth they sold them in the first place. Further inquiries with Dell gave a recommendation to replace the H200 controllers with the more powerful H700. We did, and one of the H700 equipped servers got worse. AnalysisДЄ support ticket with Dell gave the usual response: update your firmware and drivers. We have a combination of H200, H700 and H710 PERC controllers on these servers, and the issues didnвЂ™t seem to follow a pattern, with one exception: all H200 equipped servers experienced poor performance. Even the cheapest laptops with 4500 RPM SATA drives would outperform such stats, and these servers had 10 or 15K RPM SAS drives on a 6Gbps bus. Typically, read and write latency would never get below 11ms, even with next to no load on a freshly reinstalled server. Poor enough to trigger negative marks on a MSSQL RAP. IвЂ™ve been managing a lot of Dell servers lately, where the baseline showed very poor performance for local drives connected to PERC (PowerEdge Expandable RAID Controller) controllers.

Dell perc h200 initializing