Introduction

To prepare the PowerEdge servers for the production, XVC, virtual, and management environments, follow the procedures in this section to:

1. Configure the local disk drives.

2. Configure the BIOS settings.
3. Review the recommended slots for NICs and HBAs.

Configuring local disk drives

The following table lists the software that is hosted on the local disk drives of the PowerEdge database servers. The database data itself resides on the XtremIO X2 storage array.

Table 17.        Server-hosted software

We recommend the following local disk drive configuration for each of the PowerEdge servers:

• At least two local disks (SSDs or hard drives) per server in a RAID configuration
• A single virtual disk (VD) of type RAID 1 or RAID 10, depending on the number of local disks in the server
• At least one global hot spare—the same type that you used to create the VD—in each server
• A minimum of 1.2 TB of usable space

The following Dell EMC Knowledge Base articles provide information about creating a VD:

• Using System Setup: Dell PowerEdge: How to create a Virtual Disk through the System Setup on 14G servers
• Using iDRAC: Dell PowerEdge: How to create a Virtual Disk using iDRAC 9

To create the global hot spare, see the instructions in the following Knowledge Base article: Dell PowerEdge: How to Assign a Hard Drive in Global Hot Spare.

Recommended BIOS settings

We recommend the following BIOS settings for the PowerEdge servers:

• Memory: Default options
• Processor: Default options
• System Profile: Performance (nondefault option)

Recommended slots for NICs and HBAs

The slot recommendations in this section are based on the chassis type that we used in testing. The chassis type that we used is noted in each of the tables in this section. If you choose a different chassis type, the NICs and HBAs that are shipped from the factory are populated in the recommended PCIe slots for that server.

The following table shows the recommended PCIe slots for the NICs and HBAs in the two R940-based production database servers:

Table 18.        Production database servers: Recommended PCIe slots for NICs and HBAs

The following table shows the recommended PCIe slots for the NICs and HBAs in the single R940-based virtual database server:

Table 19.        Virtual database server: Recommended PCIe slots for NICs and HBAs

The following table shows the recommended PCIe slots for the NICs and HBAs in the R740-based XVC database server:

Table 20.        XVC database server: Recommended PCIe slots for NICs and HBAs

* We used one of the 10 GbE ports on the rNDC for database public traffic.