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

After a miserable fail with the LSA 8110-4i card in our Cisco C240M3 servers it was time to revert back to the original LSI 9266-8i cards. There are two main reasons for this first, no drivers from Cisco for Server 2012 R2 and apparent discontinue of the card in general.

This should be pretty simple right lets check the RAID Controller Considerations first.

• http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/c/hw/C240/install/C240/raid.html#pgfId-1017952

Under Raid Controller cabling its seems straight forward and simple. I have 24 drives and a PCI-Style Card. SAS port 1 on the expander goes to SAS port 1 on the card and SAS port 2 on the expander goes to SAS port 2. SIMPLE!!!!!!! lets do it.

When we try to cable this up the Cisco Motherboard is clearly marked and we are ready to go, lets plug in the card and were done.. WAIT!!! the card is not marked SAS1 and SAS2 its marked J5A1 and J5B1. So time to get out the LSI product guide.

• http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public/RAID%20Controllers/RAID%20Controllers%20Common%20Files/53063-01_RevB_SAS_9266-4i_and_9266-8i_Controllers.pdf

Yup just as I suspected the guide states the same so which is SAS1 and SAS2?

Looking further into the document we find that J5A1 supports SAS ports 0-3 and J5B1 supports SAS ports 4-7. We also find that  the 9266-4i card does not have J5B1. So to me that J5A1 = SAS1 and J5B1=SAS2. Since this was a critical server with my ass on the line I contacted Cisco Support and after a few hours on the phone it was confirmed that my assumptions were correct.

 

 

Needless to say, MY BRAIN HERTZ