Looking for directions to setup the B series blades to boot locally

[jn242]

I have b200m5 blades

Working to move away from boot from SD Card and have purchased new SSD drives and controllers. The drives i have are your standard 2.5 inch 240gb ssd drives that slide into  the front of each blade.  Id like to load them up so they are mirrored (RAID1).

I would then like to load ESX and restore my previous config to them so they are then booting off the internal RAID1 disk.

This is all in preparation to upgrade to ESXi 8 eventually. 

Right now i can see both of my internal drives seperately in esxi after installing them. 

I cant figure out in UCS how to configure the megaraid  controller to setup a mirrored drive set to boot off of. DO i need to manually create the RAID1 set in each blade manually from the MegaRAID bios or can this be done with a "storage policy" in ucs? 

All i can seem to find is this C series nonsense:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/c/sw/raid/configuration/guide/b_cisco-ucs-servers-raid-guide/m-lsi-megaraid-sas-controller-tasks.html

This seems to suggest you must do everything manually outside of ucsm to create the raid and boot stuff but this article is specific to C series so maybe it isnt valid here. 

I would think i would need. 

1. a storage policy (to create the raid)

2. a new boot policy (to boot from the newly created local drive)

3. a bios policy (to allow the bios to see the raid controller bootable drives

Is there instruction or documentation on this somewhere? I have searched and searched but found nothing. I would think folks would be doing a lot of this considering esxi not supporting SDcard or USB any longer after 7. Its either boot from local drive or boot from SAN which locks you into your SAN vendor which isnt ideal. 

Anyway.....just looking for guidance or some sort of actual documentation on how to utilize the local drive bays with the B series blades. 

[Kirk J]

There is a little older guide (https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/c/sw/raid/configuration/guide/b_cisco-ucs-servers-raid-guide/m_using-ucsm-for-raid-config-and-monitoring.pdf) that would still apply to your circumstances.

For simple boot drive mirror config, you can just use a local disk configuration policy, and shouldn't need the more complex storage profile.

For your boot order policy, you should be able to just create one referencing the local device of 'local disk', with the boot mode set to 'legacy'.  This assumes your disk config and sizes are not going to require Uefi (VD is greater than 2TB, or using 4K sectors, etc).

Hardware discovery is going to find your storage controller and plugged in drives, so you should not need a specific bios policy in regards to your blade's SAS controller.

Kirk...