SAS Cabling for upgrading a Cisco UCS-C240M3 RAID controller Card from LSI 9266-8i to a LSI 8110-4i

Today my brain hertz because of the lack of documentation for the cabling of a LSI SAS 8110-4i RAID Card on a Cisco C240M3 Server running 24 SFF Drives.

 First lets read the documentation that I was able to find:

• Installation and Service Guide
• http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/c/hw/C240/install/C240/raid.html#67332
• RAID Controller Considerations
• http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/c/hw/C240/install/C240.pdf

Make sure to note from the Install and Service Guide:

LSI Nytro MegaRAID 8110-4i Considerations

• This card is not supported with the SFF 16-drive direct-connect backplane version of the server.
• This card is supported only in slot 3 of the server.
• This card is supported only with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 OS.
• This card is supported only in dual-CPU configurations.
• This card is supported only in servers that have Intel E5-2600 Series processors
  (not Intel E5-2600 v2 Series processors).
• This card is supported only with hard disk drives (not solid state drives).
• This card cannot coexist with any installed GPU card.
• This card cannot coexist with multiple RAID controllers.

So lets go install the card, that's simple enough right? My server was purchased with a 9266-8i Card that I removed from the server. I removed the 2 SAS cables and the battery pack wire from the card. Good thing I read the document above, because the new card is not supported in the slot the old card was removed from. (Don't forget your blanking panel for proper cooling).

I went to connect the 2 SAS cables to the new card 8110 and Houston we have a problem........ There is only one SAS Port on the new card and I had 2 cables to connect. There was no information in the documentation about a single SAS port or how this is supposed to be connected, so now what??

I opened a new support request with Cisco (John/Patrick this was not you, I opened a separate case for this issue as it was not related to our case) and they said to cable it the way the 9266 card was cabled, well that isn't going to work as I explained that is not possible and I am still waiting for an answer on that one...... No time to wait, we had another server that was purchased with the 8110 card in it, during a maintenance window I popped the server open and found the following for how to properly cable this card.

• 8110 Card SAS Port 1 - Connects to Expander SAS Port 1
• Expander SAS Port 2 - Connects to Embedded RAID SAS Port 1

Needless to say, MY BRAIN HERTZ