Setting Up RAID Volumes on Cisco UCS C series with Avago/LSI/MegaRAID Controllers

On a C220M4, I discovered that the controller configures the drives as JBOD. Fixing this is easy, but not quite as straightforward as one would expect... especially considering that the controller has been a mainstay of servers for a very long time.

1. Go into the controller firmware (I had to do a control-M before I saw the control-R option):

 

As you can see, create virtual drives is not an option. Select "Make Unconfigured Good"

 

Select all the drives and click OK. 

Now you have the option to create a volume.

 

Cisco UCS C220M4s and the Purple Screen of Death - Could not start pcpu 1: TSC sync timed out

Recently, I had to install ESXi 5.5 on a Cisco rackmount server. VMware crashed with the purple screen of death.

Here's the display:

These are relatively new servers, so there was nothing especially helpful on the web. Other people had this problem, but I couldn't find any real solutions, other than a reference to C states on the CPU.

I experimented a bit and figured that CPU power savings might be the problem (I'd seen this before on Opteron servers.)

The fix is to set CPU performance to HPC (it defaults to Enterprise) in BIOS:

 

That's advanced -> CPU Performance -> HPC (from Enterprise)

This solved the problem.