Does the Azure Stack HCI preview support installing on physical servers?

Question

We are trying to install the preview on Lenovo MX1021 certified nodes. The install program says it cannot install to the M.2 RAID drive which is the boot media on these systems.

Answer 1

Hey - could you confirm, the error is during the setup phase, and the M2 RAID drive can't be found, or is the M2 drive found, and when you select it, there's an error?

If it can't locate the drive, first, download the storage driver from Lenovo, and put it on a USB stick attached to the server. When you get to the "Where do you want to install..." page of the install, press Shift + F10 and navigate to the USB stick and install the driver using PnPUtil. From there, the drive should be visible and your installation should be able to continue.

If you can find the drive, and yet still get an error, can you provide more info on the error, screenshot etc?

Thanks!

Answer 2

Thanks. We can see the drive, but Setup says it is not bootable. We tried to load the latest drivers, but it made no difference. We are now installing WS2019 Datacenter, and that seems to work fine.

Answer 3

Thank you for this extra info. This should work fine for both WS2019 and AzSHCI Preview, so may be a bug - I'll raise this internally and get back to you. Thank you!

Answer 4

Hello,

If you remove all partitions from the disk you are attempting to install to and allow the setup to recreate them, does this make any difference? Also, as a troubleshooting step, could you try to 'hide' or temporarily remove the additional disks in the system to see if this makes a difference?

Best Regards,
Trent

Answer 5

It would also be useful to know more about the disk controller. I assume these M.2 devices are SATA and not NVMe, so knowing the RAID adapter model would be most helpful.