One of the necessary steps to create a new VMware vSAN cluster is to configure the RAID controller.

I have found Joe’s post about setting up Dell PERC H730 cards very informative and easy to follow. However, the latest generation of Dell’s PowerEdge servers has a slightly different configuration interface. So I decided to document configuration process using the BIOS graphical interface.

You can get into it either pressing an F2 key during the server boot or choosing a BIOS Setup option in the Next Boot drop-down menu in the iDRAC Virtual Console.

The next step is to click on the Device Settings and select the RAID controller from the list of available devices.

There are two configuration pages that we should be interested in, as follows:

• Controller Management > Advanced Controller Management
• Controller Management > Advanced Controller Properties.

The former gives us ability to switch from RAID mode to HBA mode.

The latter allows disabling the controller caching and setting the BIOS Boot mode.

Please note the system reboot is required for the change to take effect. It is always a good idea to double check that the parameters above were setup correctly.