C220 M3 w/ SAS drives not being recognized

[mansolo44]

Hi Cisco community,

I am trying to enable a server we have with multiple SAS drives by installing any OS. During installation, none of the drives are recognized. Looking at past posts, I found: 

https://supportforums.cisco.com/discussion/12983986/c220-m3-standalone-raid-hard-drive-configuration

But in my case, I don't have any HW RAID controller card and I have DISABLED the South Bridge SW controller. But still, the HDD are not visible to the OS install. I have upgraded via HUU all components to the latest version.

What could be the problem? I have the same situation on two servers so hard to think it is HW problem. Any help is appreciated. Thank you!!

[Kirk J]

Greetings.

The embedded controller is SATA only, without enabling SAS& SATA with UCSC-RAID-ROM5 or UCSC-RAID-ROM55, or addin SAS controller.

http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-c-series-rack-servers/c220m3-sff-specsheet.pdf

Thanks,

Kirk...

[mansolo44]

Thank you Kirk. What I want to do is completely disable the embedded RAID controller as I don't want to use any RAID controller, virtual or physical. The hosts will be used for virtualization. What is the process to do that, if you know.

Thanks again for all your help!!

[Kirk J]

What controller are you planning on using to connect your SAS drives to?

Disabling the SCU/megaraidSR, leaves the embedded controller (intel ICH10) in AHCI mode, but is still a SATA controller which won't interface with SAS drives.

Thanks,

Kirk...

[mansolo44]

Hi Kirk,

I don't want or plan to use any controller for the SAS drives, would that be allowed? I currently have the SW controller disabled on both the CIMC BIOS config and Setup and still the SAS drives are not showing up.

Thank you!! 

[Kirk J · Accepted solution]

SAS drives will require a compatible SAS controller (regardless of mode, i.e. jbod/AHCI, RAID).  Disabling the MegaRaidSR front end to the embedded controller (Intel ICH10) so as to put controller in AHCI mode, still doesn't overcome the issue that this is a SATA controller that your are trying to connect SAS drives to....

With your described environment, your SAS drives are not going to be discovered without purchasing the UCSC-RAID-ROM5 or UCSC-RAID-ROM55 to make your embedded controller work with SAS drives, or purchase a SAS controller.

Thanks,

Kirk...

[mansolo44]

Thank you Kirk. Ok, that is bad news :( So for running ESXi hosts, I cannot use the embedded controller so will have to go with a SAS controller, correct?

Thank you!!

[Kirk J]

That is correct.  VMware (and hypervisors in general) do not support the Software raid controller.

Thanks,

Kirk...

[mansolo44]

Final question as I don't have room for error anymore :(

I could use one of the following according to the spec sheet. All of them would work with ESXi? Also, I really don't want to enable RAID at all, will I be able to do that after installing the controller?

UCSC-RAID-11-C220 (w/ 2 CPU, which we do)
UCSC-RAID-MZ-220 (w/ 2 CPU, which we do)

UCS-RAID9271-8I
UCS-RAID9271CV-8I

Thank you!!

[Kirk J]

Those options are basically the LSI 2008Mezz  card and the 9271 raid controller, both of which are VMware compatible.

The 9271CV model includes a SuperCap, which enables write-back caching, and probably the best performance (and highest $) of the options.

Kirk... 

[mansolo44]

Cool, and re: not have any RAID protection, that is still possible once i have the HW in place? Again, this is a dev setup and don't need RAID, we have other backup and recovery mechanisms in use.


Thank you!

[Kirk J]

If you have recent firmware you should have jbod option, or can do raid 0 if you don't want parity overhead.

Kirk...