C200 M2 LFF does not see disks in boot menu after ESXi installation

[michgri]

So in front of me I have a brand new C200 M2 LFF with a single E5606 processor, 20 GB of RAM and an LSI Megaraid 9260-4i controller and 4 1-TB SAS disks. I've put the disks in a RAID 5 array I've created a 10 GB virtual disk and successfully installed ESXi on it twice, with a second virtual disk to be used as a datastore.

However, I can't get the thing to boot. It's not even an option. The only storage option in the boot menu is the DVD drive. If I look at the mass stroage controller configuration, in fact, SATA ports 0 through 4 are "not installed" and port 5 has the DVD drive.

I've tried fiddling with the BIOS settings without any luck.Currently the onboard controller is enabled and the SATA mode is set to enhanced (which seems to be the default and what is recommended with the Megaraid cards). This was a bundle (UCSC-DBUN-C200-102 per the packing slip, which seems to be a disti-only part number), so I didn't have to assemble anything and I would assume all the cables were connected in the factory. I've opened up the server, and as far as I can tell all the cables look connected.

Any suggestions? Any help would be greatly appreciated. If I have to open a case with the TAC, that's fine, but considering that I can actually install the operating system it has to be something stupid I'm missing.

[David McFarland · Accepted solution]

disable the onboard controller. That is the ICH10R software raid.

Reboot. Then in CIMC/BIOS set boot order and pint at the LSI.

To get the latest ESXi 5.0, go to VMWare and search on "ESXi 5.0 rollup 2".

Sent from Cisco Technical Support iPhone App

[michgri]

Thanks. I had actually tried that with the boot mode set at UEFI and it didn't work, but I gave it another try set at legacy and it works fine.

The documentation for this seems confusing to me, though. Isn't this RAID card considered a mezzanine card? The documentation here says to enable the onboard controller to get a mezzanine card to work:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/unified_computing/ucs/c/hw/C200M1/install/RAID.html#wp1016766

[David McFarland]

Michael,

Thanks for pointing me to the documentation. I'm 99.99% sure this is an error. I'll doublecheck and work with the doc folks on it. The BIOS onboard enable is used to enable the SouthBridge Intel/LSI software raid. A mezzanie/PCIe LSI does not require the feature to be enabled.

I'm guessing your issue was more the boot order than anything else.

Dave

[michgri]

Okay, good to know. My assumption was that if I could write to the disks then I should be able to boot from them.