R820 build issues.

Less a question and more a record of what has been happening during an R820 build, three days in and counting. First, the hardware:

Poweredge R820 with 4 2.2GHz 8-core CPUs, 256GB RAM, PERC H710

Adding to the system:

8 WD Blue 500G SATA SSD drives

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS OS

MegaRAID 9380-8e (driving LTO7 library and SANS DIgital JBOD of 20 6TB WD Red)

Note, I've installed a similar configuration on an R710 without issue, albeit running Windows Server 2012 R2

First I install the (SSD) drives and the MegaRAID. Configure 8-disk RAID5 in PERC config. Then take my bootable Ubuntu USB stick and attempt install. System does not see the USB stick. I also note that occasionally the USB keyboard becomes non responsive, and I have to unplug it and plug it back in, then it recovers.

So, I burn Ubuntu to DVD and attempt again (mind you as you read along, each reboot is about 5 minutes). Boots to disk, install performed, looks great, reboot after installation, and receive an error:

attempt to read or write outside disk 'hd0'

So this puts me at a grub rescue prompt, and I proceed through all the different Ubuntu/grub forums I can find and try many things, none of which work. I saw a reference to large filesystems not being well handled by Ubuntu installs so next I...

...break the RAID, and create a 500GB RAID1 and the remaining 6 drives as RAID5. Attempt again, and install seems to work again, but I receive the same 'hd0' error. I had been doing a "BIOS" boot in setup, because UEFI did not seem to see any PERC filesystems for boot, but I tried going to UEFI anyway, and that failed to provide any results.

So I figure I can be a good boy and use the Lifecycle Controller to deploy. I go into the controller, skip RAID setup, and choose SLES 11 as the OS, then manual install, then approve that I do not have SLES (I have Ubuntu) and the system loads drivers and restarts. When it gets past the point of initializing firmware interfaces the activity LEDs on the SSD mirror start to blink continuously, and the screen remains blank. I have left it like this for over an hour, and nothing comes back.

So, I try again using Lifecycle controller, and this time I go into the RAID controller and configure just a 500G RAID0 with one of the drives, and (prior to boot) yanked the other 7 out so they would not delay the boot process of confuse the system. I proceed then as above with selecting SuSE as the OS of choice, drivers load, reboots, and proceeds (minutes later, after all the startup pain) to just continuously hold the LED on the single drive and again, the blank screen.

I have purchased two R820 systems, and I attempted to do the install on the other system (minus MegaRAID) to see if it was an issue with the system I had been working on, but the behavior exhibited was the exact same, so guessing that this is chronic to the R820 I thought I would report this on the forum so other people do not waste days of their lives messing with this when they could be taking their kids to the zoo or doing other things that are great in life rather than sitting in a cold computer room constantly being denied.

Anyway, figure my next step will be to dig out some old 73GB SAS spinners and see if this nice new hardware just prefers legacy drives. I'll update as I find out more.