Owner

I'm working with a customer that has a 2014 R420 1U server. It came with VMWare 5.5 and I wanted to upgrade to a newer version of ESXi.

I upgraded to 6.5 and all was good. I then attempted to update to 7.0 but it complained that the internal IDSDM modules were too small at 1GB.

So I read about how to upgrade to larger SD Cards.

I purchased 2 32GB SD Cards.

Following the procedures outlined I took the cards out of the SD Module dutifully labeling them as 1 and 2 as appropriate.

On a Windows desktop using SDImager I created images (.img files) of both disks and then wrote image 1 to the new 32GB card labeled 1, and image 2 to the new 32GB card labeled 2.

I then placed both new cards in the server module and rebooted.

With the two 32GB cards as I booted, it said SD Card 1 needs to be copied to SD Card 2 (I may have that the wrong way around) but when I said Y to copy it said copying and progress remained at 00% for long enough that I shut down. 

So I shut down, installed the original cards and rebooted and all was fine.

So I decided to try again. This time when trying to write the images to the new cards the procedure failed with "Access is denied". At this point I decided to quit while I was ahead and put the original smaller cards back in.

This time on boot I got a message saying card 1 needed to be copied to card 2 so I answered Y at which point it claimed that the cards were of different sizes and could not be mirrored. Remember, these were the two original cards that have been operating fine for over 10 years.

I would like to know how to solve this as the system is currently running withoiut any redundancy. So that is question 1 - How do I mirror those two cards?

So after a few days, I decided to try a different approach. I took a copy of the the vm configuration and planned to put in two brand new untouched 32 GB cards, install 6.5, and then restore the vm configuration.

When I booted with the two clean cards I booted from a USB device with VMware 6.5 on it. It booted just fine but then it offered 2 solutions of where to install the ESXi.

1. The USB from which I had booted

2. The main datastore of the VMs.

It did not present the option of the iDSDM modules.

It occurs to me that the 2 new cards need to be mirrored but I can find no way in the BIOS or via the iDRAC to initialize those cards. The only option I see is for them to be mirrored or not, but I can find no option to access those cards.

So question 2 is how should I initialize the two new SD Cards?