I encountered an epic planning fail on my part this morning. During the annual Christmas Maintenance that I perform, I decided to upgrade my Hyper-V cluster to Server 2012, since I have the Datacenter licenses and want to use some of the features.
So I took my time and prepared the upgrade, documenting every step I would take so that things go smoothly.
When I began the process, I booted into the Server 2012 media, loaded the PERC S300 drivers from Dell (Server 2008 R2 should work right?) and got a blue screen.
I did some quick digging, and the S300 is not supported for Server 2012, and never will be.
I can’t believe that I didn’t think to check my RAID card for compatibility before embarking upon this. At this point I don’t want to run my Hyper-V host without RAID (by converting the S300 into a regular SATA controller) so I’ll look at the PERC H200 or H700 from my Dell rep.
Why is it that with all the preparations made, there’s always something forgotten?
If it makes you fell any better I just did EXACTLY the same thing, even after you had written this…
It doesn’t make me feel much better; I wish Dell would just provide up to date driver support. It’s not like the part is very old.
After a bunch of trouble with reading comprehension from my Dell rep, I finally got a half-height SAS6/iR card to use for RAID1 which is supported by Server 2012.
Hi Jeff,
The software raid options in 2012 are limited. here’s a forum posting if anyone needs information on the compatibility. esxi and Linux also won’t work, but they won’t work on any software raid. The performance and recovery is also better on that sas6/ir even though it’s a few years old.
http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os-applications/w/wiki/4311.dell-software-raid-controller-support-for-microsoft-windows-server-2012
I’m actually using server 2012 with Perc S300, but it’s using another RAID Controller to boot. the S300 is configured in RAID 1 for two SATA disks. I’m very disapointed with the S300, it’s slow, management is bad, it’s software RAID and is not supported in Linux.
BTW the driver was installed automatically via windows update.
Hello Gabriel
can you tell me how you clean installed server 2012 with with PERC S300
thank you
I used the 2008 driver during setup and it worked fine.
DELL_MULTI-DEVICE_A05_R294489.exe
Thaks a lot!
*Thanks
I used the 2008 driver during setup and it doesnt work at all.