Auto-attach vFlash at boot on iDRAC6 Enterprise card

This may, or may not , help, but I have 4 x R805's that the binding is persistant across hard power offs.

The R610 and R710 are offered with an SD card option (1GB) for doing diskless boots (e.g. VMware ESXi or Citrix XenServer). Why try to do an unsupported workaround when there's an easy supported solution available?

From everything that I've read about the vFlash card, it was designed for being able to update firmwares and bioses without having to do it from the OS and/or do OS installs from it. I haven't seen any information from Dell showing the option to do a normal boot to a full fledged OS from the vFlash card.

Generally with server vendors the rule is; if it's not listed/documented as supported, assume it's not supported (otherwise they haven't to make huge documents listing every possible unsupported option/configuration/hardware-combo they (and users) can think off).

To be clear, the binding remains after the machine completely loses power?

I have a very specific use case for doing what I am doing.  These machines are deployed in areas where there are not necessarily technical people available to service them.  The vFlash card is accessible from the back of the chassis.  The internal card is not.  I would have to train non-technical individuals to un-rack and open servers to replace the SD card should I have the need to do so.  Otherwise with the vFlash they can simply eject the SD card and put in a new one, minimizing the risk of making a mistake.

I also don't see how this is unsupported, the DRAC clearly gives the option to partition, format, and boot from vFlash.  It's in the GUI, there are no hacks here.

I'm also looking to do the same thing. Right now I have to login to each server's iDRAC and go into the vFlash menu, then into Manage, then check the Attached box, then do a warm reset for it to be able to boot off the SD card. Surely there must be a way to make this setting persist across cold restarts?

We just got 720xd server with iDrac7 Enterprise. I installed esxi 5.1 on vflash (created partition etc), but on cold boot vflash is not automatically attached. I have to attach it manually through iDrac GUI. Why would I use vflash if I cannot cold reboot (major power failure) server and automatically boot my hypervisor? Is it possible that this issue is not resolved in iDrac7?

I am having same issue.. Running esxi on vflash sd card and I would like to permanently set to boot from the vflash upon reboot...

As it stands now I ahve to explicitly set this(attache the vflash partition, pick from console to boot from it,etc).. if I dont it will NOT boot from it upon next boot...

Some info to my post, dell r620, idrac 7...

FYI this works perfectly on my R610 servers, both with iDRAC 6 Express & Enterprise. However this does NOT work on my R410 servers, which also have iDRAC 6 Enterprise cards. Surely this is something that could be addressed with afirmware update.