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October 14th, 2020 07:00
R540 and PERC H710 cabling
I have a Poweredge R540 that was ordered with no raid, so it came with the S100 series software PERC. Originally there was no need for internal storage, but the needs for this server changed recently to include internal storage.
I disabled the software raid by setting the RAID mode to off in BIOS.
Installed a PERC H710 and re-cabled it to the backplane.
After installation, I was able to configure the new controller, initialize 3 disks as a RAID 5 and copy a few TB of data in. Everything is working almost exactly as expected but there are 2 errors being thrown at boot time:
The storage BP1 SAS A0 cable is not connected, or is improperly connected. The storage BP1 SAS B0 cable is not connected, or is improperly connected.
Like I said, everything is working but these 2 errors are halting the boot process to require acknowledgement and interaction in order to boot the server, which puts a bit of a kink in my lights out strategy. The server cannot boot without human interaction anymore.
The OS is ESXi 6.7 and vCenter is also picking it up as sensor errors and throwing critical alarms.
I have been banging my head against this thing for a week now. How can I get rid of these errors?
DELL-Chris H
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October 14th, 2020 12:00
Plumbtrician,
One of the things that stands out to me is that you're using a raid controller not supported on the server. The H710 is a 12th generation controller, not intended for use in the 14th generation servers. The supported controllers would be the H730 & H740 series.
Hope this helps.
theflash1932
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October 14th, 2020 12:00
I wish I had a link, but somewhere on the forums discusses this ... it is a problem with the cable. Is it a third-party cable? or a genuine Dell OEM? I don't believe it needs to be Dell OEM specifically, but some brands of cables throw that error, apparently. Not sure they resolved it other than to get a different cable.
theflash1932
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October 14th, 2020 12:00
Yes, sorry, good catch ... you should be using the H730 or H740, in the format supported for this server (adapter vs integrated vs modular, etc.).