Adaptec in the Cisco!

Written by John Miller

So far these posts have been severely lacking in media, so this one is going to have a ton of pictures to overcompensate.

I got home, and after talking to and congratulating my wife for completing her first day at a new job (woo!) began the process of installing the Adaptec 2405 into the C220M3. The longest part of the process was waiting for updates to finish running on a Windows 7 VM. Once that was done it was pop the lid, install the card. Done. Sort of.

The card fits just right into the PCI1 riser, you can see the two SAS connectors very conveniently close on the motherboard... but there may not be enough slack in the cables....

Yay! Cisco provided additional cabling under one of the plastic shields!

The SAS cable reaches the extra two inches with no problems. Time to boot it up...

It works! Hooray! (Ignore the 15 minutes it took me to figure out how to re-enable option ROMs in the BIOS...)

I moved my two 128GB SSDs to bays 7 and 8 for the test.

Pulled them into a striped array.

And ESXi sees it!

Up next, benchmarking!