Try a Qlogic or Emulex card. Dell sells those (for connectivity to EMC SANs), so if you get one of those cards and the card supports boot, I imagine it should work w/o too much hassle. You can also verify that this server supports boot from (EMC) SAN with certain cards by checking the EMC support matrix and look in the "External Boot" column. This will get you a combo of the 1950 with a fibre HBA that can definitely support booting to SAN, even if you're not using an EMC SAN.

Dell sells MPT based LSI cards as well (sas/sata). Dell's PERC cards are LSI and they support boot.

The LSI cards enable boot with any other vendor's bios (intel, supermicro, tyan).

 

Is it only the combination of Dell and FC that does not support boot? 

It's probably never been tested, as Dell sells only Dell|EMC FC SANs, so they don't test for other SAN vendors. EMC's support matrix only lists Qlogic and Emulex HBAs (some rebranded versions of these vendors' HBAs), so I imagine they never bothered to test LSI FC HBAs. There may be specific bios requirements that just aren't there.

The chances of Dell changing their bios for LSI HBAs would be unlikely, so unless someone else ran into this before and has the fix, you may want to look at another solution like booting to local drives or using an HBA brand that has been validated on the server to support boot-from-san.

It is possible that the LSI FC HBA has its BIOS display turned off.  This means the HBA will not show up during post, however, the HBA will still work.  There may be a setting on the HBA (via its management application to enable it to display during POST). You would need to enable its option rom (once you find it) to use boot from SAN.

 

Check with LSI support to see how you enable the HBA to show up during POST (assuming that the card is working).  According to the LSI site, the HBAs support booting from bootable devices

The card is working just fine. Once I boot to Linux off PXE, I see the card and the connected drives with their installed OS. Its only the during POST as you say, that it doesn't show up, nor do I see its drives.

 

I'll check the LSI management app. That is a very good idea. 

Thanks