New UCSC-220-M3L Does Not Recognize 500GB SATA Drives

[Steven Batsford]

It's a long story but the end of it is that I ordered UCSC-220-M3L servers without hard drives

The drives were ordered seperately. They are 500GB SATA drives (UCS-HDD500GI1F211) mounted on the sleds for this server.

They plug in and power up. When I log onto the CIMC and look at system logs the server knows they are there.

But they don't show up anywhere.

If I go into the BIOS and check the boot order only my network interfaces are listed.

Anybody have any ideas?

[Keny Perez]

Steven,

Could you please let us know the following:

1-CIMC version

2-RAID controller model (or let us know if you are using the embedded one)

3-If you do not have a Hardware RAID controller, be sure the embedded RAID controller is enabled in BIOS (Advanced> South Bridge> Onboard... > Enable> F10)

4-Please share some screenshots of CIMC, preferably Summary, Inventory, PCI adapters, Storage tabs

Looking forward to hearing from you.

-Kenny

[Steven Batsford]

Hi Ken,

Firstly undertsand, I am using this server in a lab environment so I am not using RAID. When I ordered it I did not select any RAID option. This is what I had done with UCSC-200 servers in the past. On those servers a drive just shopws up as a SATA drive.

When I placed the order through the Cisco internal ordering system it allowed me to configure the UCSC-220-M3L system with the 500GB drives mentioned in my earlier post. But when the internal order processing people tried to put it into the productionordering system it told them that the 500GB drive was an unaccepted configuration. So they ended up ordering the server with no hard drives and ordering me the drives seperately. So I received the servers from the factory with no hard drives.

OK. Now here's answers to your questions:

1: CIMC Summary Page:

2. I am not using RAID

3. I did enable Southbridge. Didn't make a difference

4. see images below:

[Steven Batsford]

Additional images

[Keny Perez]

Steven,

Disabling the Option ROMs from BIOS configuration in CIMC should help see the HDD.

Let us know if that works.

-Kenny

[Steven Batsford]

Kenny,

Yes that worked. After disabling the PCI option ROMs the system recognized the drives when Southbridge setting was set to LSI Software RAID. A RAID array was able to be built when running the RAID configuration tool during the boot process.

I had read in one of the UCS server online manuals that the built-in software RAID is not supported for VMware. I tested this and that is true. Even though the ESXi installer could see the RAID volume and successfully install itself the system could not boot from it.

I then changed the Southbirdge setting to Intel RST RAID. during the boot process I initiated the setup for that option and made sure no RAID was configured. On a boot the system now sees the hard drives as non-RAID drives. I was able then successfully able to instal ESXi 5.1 on the first drive and boot from it.

So the conclusion is; if you want to install ESXi on a UCSC-220 M3 server with RAID you need to order one of the hardware RAID options.

Thanks for the help,

Steve