Hi,

Have a VRTX with 2 x M520 blades. It was previously used for 2 x ESXi hosts with shared VRTX storage, each M520 boots from SD cards.

I now need to re-purpose this chassis and install Windows on one of the M520 blades and use the VRTX shared storage as backup.

I have put 2 x 2.5" HDD into one of the M520 with the hope of building a RAID1 volume and installing Windows to this and booting from it. There is a backplane in the M520 which has allowed the drives to plug in.

VRTX - CMC firmware is on 3.40. IOMINF-1 is 11.0.0.0

M520 - iDRAC firmware is 2.20.20.20 (41). CPLD version is 1.0.6. BIOS version is 2.4.2.

When I connect to a M520 via the iDRAC virtual console, I see no way to access any internal / integrated controller and enable or disable it. This is the same from Lifecycle Controller and VRTX CMC.

Dell Perc S110 configuration utility shows no physical disks so obviously virtual disk management is not possible. Lifecycle controller tells me S110 firmware is: 01/31/2012 18:28:47

With SATA settings in BIOS set to RAID Mode, I get the following at startup (BIOS NOT INSTALLED - No Virtual Disks Found):

However maybe these SATA controller 'RAID Mode' settings are nothing to do with the Perc S110?

Is there something specific I need to do, or update, to allow me to see the physical 2.5" HDDs and build a bootable RAID 1?

Thanks.