The curios case of the IBM BLADE HS22 without local disks

by alefesta

The curios case I faced up this morning is about installing VMware Esxi 4.1 on a IBM Blade HS22 with local SAS disk. Now before deep inside the case I would like to let you notice that the customer already did a successful installation on the same blade last week using an VMware ESX 4.1 but since the recent advise from vmware :

“vSphere 4.1 and its subsequent update and patch releases are the last releases to include both ESX and ESXi hypervisor architectures. Future major releases of VMware vSphere will include only the VMware ESXi architecture. For this reason, VMware recommends that deployments of vSphere 4.x utilize the ESXi hypervisor architecture.”

Available at (http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/esxi-and-esx/) , customer decided to switch to a new installation with esxi.

Now it should be quite simple, even simplier than normal since it was not a production environment but a new installation from scratch. So we simply load the iso file from the  IBM AMM console and we started the installation.

With simply followed the installation steps and when it was time to choose the disks where to install there were no local disk to use.

After further investigation  we decided to proceed in the following manner:

  1. We restared the  IBM Blade HS22 and from the  LSI console we deleted the Logical Volume.
  2. At this point we decided to try a first install using the local disk as two standalone drives.

This time, as you may see in the picture below the server recognize the disk, with just a minor issue that the “local” disk is seen as “remote” disk.

The installation went without any further  problems so we restared the server again and we recreated the IM Volume:

  1. At boot press F1 and enter in the UEFI console
  2. Select System Settings
  3. Select  the  LSI controller
  4. Once inside the controller menu select the RAID controller
  5. Select Raid Proerties
  6. Add the first disk to the IM Volume
  7. Add the second disk to the IM volume
  8. Exit saving the configuration and reboot.

As is it possible to see below the server reboot successfully.

Now what we see is that the main problem is in the driver of the LSI controller that is not recognized by Esxi on boot, anyway as seen once you have completed the isntallation Vmware take care of everything.