Preparing a system drive to be a boot device for an operating system (OS) is a critical step in the server set up process. The procedures used to configure RAID depend on which supported SAS HBA is installed in the server and which server BIOS boot mode is selected (UEFI or Legacy, see UEFI BIOS for details). You can use either Oracle System Assistant (recommended) or BIOS/option ROM-based RAID configuration utilities to configure RAID. Once you have installed your operating system, supported OS-based RAID management utilities included with your server can be used to manage RAID storage drives.
Choose an option for configuring your server storage drives:
Option 1 - If you have purchased an optional factory preinstalled OS or virtual machine software image, a boot drive containing the image has already been created for you. You cannot configure the disk with the preinstalled OS image as a RAID volume because that would destroy the preinstalled image. For systems with a preinstalled OS image, proceed to one of the following sections:
Option 2 - If you are going to do a fresh OS install and you want to configure multiple server storage drives into one or more RAID volumes, you must configure the server storage drives into RAID volumes before you install the OS.
If your server is equipped with Oracle System Assistant, proceed to Configuring RAID Using Oracle System Assistant and select the task that matches the internal HBA that is installed in your server.
If your server is not equipped with Oracle System Assistant, proceed to Configuring RAID Using the BIOS RAID Configuration Utilities.
Option 3 - Your server has the Sun Storage 6 Gb SAS PCIe RAID Internal HBA (SGX-SAS6-R-INT-Z) installed and you are going to do a fresh OS install, but you do not want to configure multiple storage drives into RAID volumes. For this option, you must configure a single storage drive with a RAID 0 volume (also called a "virtual disk") and make that volume bootable.
If your server is equipped with Oracle System Assistant, proceed to Configure RAID With a Sun Storage 6 Gb SAS PCIe RAID Internal HBA and configure a RAID 0 volume on a single storage drive.
If your server is not equipped with Oracle System Assistant, proceed to Configuring RAID Using the BIOS With the Sun Storage 6 Gb SAS PCIe RAID Internal HBA and configure RAID 0 volume on a single storage drive.
Option 4 - Your server has the Sun Storage 6 Gb SAS PCIe Internal HBA (SGX-SAS6-INT-Z) installed and you are going to do a fresh OS install, but you do not want to configure the server storage drives into RAID volumes. For this option, refer to the installation guide for the OS you want to install: