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I am attempting to set up a Cisco C220 M3 blade server for a company and have been running into issues with the hard driver controller(s) that the machine has. The intent is to have vmWare ESXi installed on the FlexFlash SD cards, 1 SSD on which virtual machines will be installed, and 4 HDDs which will be managed by Rockstor. According to the CIMC and the BIOS, the server has both a PCIe and a mezzanine LSI card, one of which is a 9811-8i in IT mode. Currently, the SSD is connected to one card and the 4 HDDs are connected to the 9811-8i. I possibly need to re-confirm that things are connected properly; this is a remote server so I am not able to physically check it easily.

The two problems I've run into are: the SSD isn't recognized or acknowledged by anything; and the card that the other 4 drives are connected to isn't properly recognized by CIMC, the UCS config software, or vmWare ESXi despite showing information during boot and allowing the 4 HDDs to be selected as boot options.

Relevant information about the server and various configuration menus I have accessed are in screenshots in the following imgur album: https://i.stack.imgur.com/zB0da.jpg

Oren Cope
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  • I guess you mean 9211, not 9811. Have a look at https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/c/hw/C220/install/C220/raid.html . The 9211 is not listed there which might explain why it's not recognized. Not sure what the problem is with the 2008... – hertitu Aug 10 '17 at 23:49
  • Yeah, I meant 9211, sorry. It's odd that the drives connected to it are selectable as boot options if it's not supported. – Oren Cope Aug 11 '17 at 19:03

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After more troubleshooting and going and physically connecting/disconnecting cards, it turns out that the mezzanine SAS2008 card in the server is currently non-functional and can't be flashed to a working firmware in-place. I had overlooked the fact that the SSD could be plugged directly into the motherboard, partially due to focusing solely on trying to fix the card, and enabling the server's onboard SCU support in Intel RSTe mode allows the SSD to show up in the BIOS and in ESXi. So by bypassing and removing the card entirely, the main issue with the SSD not showing up has been solved.

The working card, which also has the SAS2008 chipset and is flashed with the 9211-8i firmware in IT mode, is currently believed to be functioning as intended according to the sysadmin. Apparently ESXi is configured to treat that controller as a pass-through, serving it to running virtual machines but not displaying it in ESXi's web config.

Oren Cope
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