The following information outlines the LED management features and functionality supported by Intel® VROC, including the Intel® VROC sub-products: Intel® VROC (VMD NVMe* RAID), Intel® VROC (SATA RAID) and Intel® VROC (Non-VMD NVMe* RAID). To learn about specific features supported by each Intel® VROC sub-product, refer to the following resources:
Intel® VROC Features | LED management is one of the features of the Intel® VROC family of products. To learn about other features of Intel® VROC, refer to the Intel® Virtual RAID on CPU (Intel® VROC) Technical Product Specification for Windows*. |
The Intel® VROC family of products supports the ability to perform basic LED management of the status LEDs within SFF-8485 (or equivalent) compliant backplane and with the blink patterns as defined in SFF-8489.
Intel® VROC LED management provides the capability to configure different LED behaviors for each of the supported controller configurations:
For the platform, the PCH supports LED management through SGPIO signaling.
The LEDs management capabilities are outlined as follows:
Event | Behavior | Configuration Options | Default Setting |
Activate LED | The ability to identify a specific device in an enclosure by blinking the status LED of that drive in the defined Locate pattern. The duration of this Locate pattern can be customized to meet the customers’ needs. | Adjustable time of blinking. The range can be from 1 to 3600 seconds. Any value entered that falls outside of this range will automatically be interpreted as 12 seconds. | 12 seconds |
Drive Fails | The ability to identify a drive that is in a failed state by illuminating the status LED of that device in a defined Fail pattern. This applies to RAID volumes in a degraded or failed state. A drive is generally marked as failed (causing the Fail LED light to illuminate) when communication to that drive has been interrupted and recovery attempts have failed to reestablish a connection. Some examples of (and by no means all) conditions that can cause a drive to be marked as failed are:
| The Fail pattern will be illuminated as follows:
| Option 1 |
Managed Unplug | When a managed hot-unplug is being administered, the status LED of that drive will blink in the defined Locate pattern until the drive is physically ejected. | None | Enabled |
RAID Volume Initialization or Verify and Repair Process | When a RAID volume is in either the Initialization or Verify and Repair processes, the status LEDs will blink in the defined Rebuild pattern on all drives in the RAID volume until the process completes. |
| Enabled |
RAID Volume Rebuilding Options | When a RAID volume is in a Rebuild state, the status LED(s) will blink in the defined Rebuild pattern on either the specific drive being rebuilt or on the entire RAID volume rebuilt. |
| Disabled |
RAID Volume is Migrating | When a RAID volume migration is in process, the status LEDs will blink in the defined Rebuild pattern on all drives until the process is complete. |
| Enabled |
It is left to the administrator making the changes to know how to open the Windows* Registry Editor, modify the entries, and properly save the updates. These options are available and can be customized via the Windows* registry with the following keys.
Note that the registry key line items below are an example for the SATA controller. For the sSATA controller, change to \iaStorB\, for the tSATA controller, change to \iaStorT\, and for the Intel® Volume Management Device (Intel® VMD) controller supporting NVMe* devices, change to \iaVROC\. The settings for each keys below are the same for all controllers.
Notes |
|
When a member drive of a RAID volume is marked as failed, the Intel® VROC Graphical User Interface (GUI) application will indicate that the disk is failed and, if applicable, set the status LED to a failed state.
The Intel® VROC family of products supports the ability to blink the status LED on the specific drive when the Activate LED link is selected in the Intel® VROC GUI application.
The assumption is made that the platform is properly configured with an enclosure that supports LED management.
For the SATA/sSATA/tSATA controller, LED management is only supported when these controllers are in RAID mode.
The Intel® VROC family of products supports the ability to blink the status LEDs on all drives that are members of the degraded RAID volume as part of the RAID rebuild process. This occurs automatically on supported platforms and no user interaction is required.
When two or more different LED patterns are applicable to the same drive, the Intel® VROC driver for Windows* shall apply the following order in terms of precedence:
There are two PCIe ports designed and controlled under the Server platform PCH, since Emmitsburg.
The Intel® VROC family of products supports LED management within the UEFI environment. This includes Locate, Rebuild and Fail patterns. The LED management in the UEFI environment will only support the default values specified in the table above. Any changes that are made to the configuration in the operating system environment will not be reflected in the UEFI environment. This means that the LED behavior seen in the UEFI environment may be different from what is seen in the operating system environment (if the default values have been modified). The ability to initiate the Locate option is available in the Intel® VROC UEFI HII interface. Rebuild and Fail blink patters will occur automatically based on the condition of the RAID volume state or member drives state.
When performing the Locate functionality in the UEFI environment, the process is to manually activate and then manually disable. The LED will continue to blink until the process is manually stopped.