Card Setup In WebBIOS
After Installing the card into a test system. Setup is generally a simple process, your greeted with a startup screen that goes through the initialization process for your connected drives. Then you are given the option to enter the WebBIOS Configuration Utility. Quick reminds me quite a bit of the windows 3.1 era of computing( Not much resemblance to the Dos/Unix graphical presentation style). It also allows the silencing of alarms once inside. (Believe me the alarms on this card rival most house hold smoke alarms. There is no chance you won’t hear them over the air conditioning and fan noise in a server room.)
From here you can handle pretty much everything related to the configuration and setup of the card. Though admittedly I find it much less enjoyable to deal with than its in OS companion (the MegaRAID Storage Manager). Its a fairly simple and easy to follow mostly step by step, wizard like process. Its not quite as forgiving of configuration mistakes either.
I would highly recommend taking the time to play around in the WebBIOS CU before attempting to setup a server. If its your first time using it. The this will prevent you from making the mistake of destroying your entire configuration and having to go back through and reclaim arrays.
Reclaiming arrays from previous configuration or from different machines is possible to some degree. When you reestablish the drives in you previous array by adding them back to the controller’s configuration, mirroring the original settings. Then you use the reclaim option. This generally works if you remember the original settings.
*some screenshots taken from LSI’s CacheCade Documentation, more information and the source of these images can be had here from LSI’s website.
