I have not been able to find any formal Cisco documentation on this issue, but I encountered a problem using the SD cards for ESXi boot on B200 M3 blades. After enabling FlexFlash and adding the SD card to the boot order per the Cisco documentation, and using a 'RAID1' Local Disk Configuration Policy to enable the use of local hard drives in that configuration, the resulting service profile deployment had an error that FlexFlash RAID was in a degraded state. By changing the local disk config policy to 'any configuration' and setting a scrub policy on the SD cards, and re-acknowledging the blade a couple times (which unfortunately wiped out our original ESXi installation), we were able to overcome this error: http://quraishi.wordpress.com/2014/08/21/cisco-ucs-flexflash-configuration-of-secure-digital-sd-card/
After the server does the rediscovery and boots successfully, You will see that this is successfully paired with is RAID 1 Mirroring.
Please note the Raid Status : Enabled Paired
Error message if the Raid is not working, this means you have to go through the process again. always make sure you only change the scrub policy on the specific server profile and not the service profile template as this will create problems on the working profiles.
Another example of error is Raid Status Disabled
How to test ?
The only confirmation we can get is on the below image where it says Raid Status Enabled Paired, however I have tested swapping the SD cards out one by one and the ESXi Server boots successfully you will immediately see the error message that the pair is disabled. Unfortunately you will need to pull the server out to change swap the SD cards but hay at least you will find out if the mirroring is working.
Also you will need to remember that after installing ESXi on SD card will give you an error message on the ESXi host that ‘The ESXi host does not have persistent storage’ you will need to add the storage and a scrach partition.
To create a scrach partition follow the below VMware KB.
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1033696
or I might create a blog on how to do it later…
My friend Vikram has just posted the process on his blog http://www.viktec.com System logs on host are stored on non-persistent storage
Please find the new updates the latest firmware is bringing. Release 2.2(1b) adds support for the following:
IPv6 Management Support
Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC) In-band Management
Fabric scaling: VLAN, VIFs, IGMP, Network Adapter Endpoints
Uni-Directional Link Detection (UDLD) Support
User Space NIC (usNIC) for Low Latency
Support for Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ)
C-Series Servers Direct Connect to FI without FEX
Two-factor Authentication for UCS Manager Logins
VM-FEX for Hyper-V Management with Microsoft SCVMM
Direct KVM Access
Server Firmware Auto Sync
Enhanced Local Storage Management
Flash Adapters and HDD Firmware Management
Precision Boot Order Control
Secure Boot
UEFI Boot Support
FlexFlash (Local SD card) Support
Trusted Platform Module (TPM) Inventory
DIMM Blacklisting and Correctable Error Reporting
C-Series Board Controller Firmware Management
Additional resources related to this post:
If you want to learn more about the process of doing a Firmware update please checkout my link CISCO UCS Firmware Update Process
If you want to learn more about the process of doing a Firmware update please checkout my link advanced boot or secure boot configuration cannot be applied to the specified server There are not enough resources overall