UCS - B200 M3/M4 - Local Disk Configuration

[smil3r050]

Hello,

I've got a UCS Mini Chassis with 5 blades to play around with to learn with - Each of the blades has 2x 600G disks in them & an SD card.

Is it possible with to install ESXi on the SD card and then use the local disks in a mirrored configuration as datastores for the host?

Am I barking at the moon here? I've been able to get the OS installed on the SD card and the server boots from it, but no matter what I do, I can't seem to get it to detect any local storage. When the server boots, the RAID controller output shows it has a virtual drive of the correct size, but the OS can't see it. Am I missing something obvious here?

Thanks!

[marce1000]

 - Does the OS have a 'sufficient driver' to detect and use the RAID controller and the local storage ?

M.

[smil3r050]

Hi there,

It's the Cisco provided ESXi image for the hardware so I'd have to assume yes is the answer to that. Never occurred to me actually that could be the reason. I've been so wrapped up in my service profiles and who knows what else thinking that's where I've gone wrong.

Do Cisco supply the RAID drivers seperately for this purpose?

[marce1000]

               >...Do Cisco supply the RAID drivers separately for this purpose
  - My initial reply was rather 'generic' , I myself have no direct info's on that ,

 M.

[Wes Austin]

Sounds like either RAID controller driver is missing or the Virtual Drive configuration is not correct in Service Profile. Does the issue persist across multiple different ESXi installers?

Can you post your Service profile, local disk and boot order details? 

[smil3r050 · Accepted solution]

So I managed to get this working, although I decided to scrap the idea of using the SD cards.

In the end I removed any of the RAID configuration through the BIOS so the disks were left as 'Unconfigured Good'. Attached a new storage profile with a couple of LUNs - one for the OS, the other as a VM datastore.

Applied this to each of the 5 blades and then installed the 'custom' Cisco ESXi image from VMWare. I have 2x M3 blades and 3x M4 blades so I ended up going for 6.7U3 release which detected the VDs without anything further on all 5 blades (I think 7.0 and above isn't officially supported on the M3 blades).

All seems okay so far. Thanks to those who did reply offering assistance!