Hi Everyone,
I recently acquired a UCS-E140S-M1 server, and have been testing out various installations. My great hope was to install Windows Server Preview (i.e. WS 2016 17046), however this only seems to work under legacy booting. I'm aware that only WS2012r2 and earlier are officially supported on the M1 series, but I'd still like to get this working if possible (it's a lab environment). Here's my experience:
UCS-E140S was updated with HUU-3.1.4. Default bios settings favor legacy booting, so tried installing WS12 & WS16 in legacy mode - no issues. Then started attempting UEFI installs. The CSM (Compatibility Support) has about 6 options, so I tried various combinations of these - the results were always the same. WS2012 installs just fine but WS12r2 and WS16 installs freeze - always at the same point, I've attached a screenshot of this - even the progress wheel ALWAYS stops at this exact position.
Until I found this document:
The last section - Installing W2K12 to Support RAID Volumes Larger than 2TB shows a CSM BIOS options configuration (Figure 26. Configuring BIOS Setup) that I attempted with interesting results.
Now (and only with this exact BIOS config) WS12r2 also installs and runs correctly, but... WS16 (all variants, retail, Hyper-V server, preview) still freezes - at exactly the same point as before. And this is all I know. With WS12r2 installed, WS16 can be run as a Gen2 VM, but, so far, I've seen nothing to indicate that WS16 can be installed to bare-metal, natively.
So can anyone shed any light on this? I suspect that other UCS-E M1 server products would also behave this way, but I'd be keen to hear from anyone with practical experience. Please note that only UEFI installs cause this issue, legacy bios installs all work perfectly well. Thanks, I hope this info can assist somebody out there, or that somebody out there can assist me, so look forward to hearing of other experiences.
