Installing ESXi on an iDRAC6 Flash Card

Installation of VMware ESXi OS on iDRAC Flash card.

No cause information.

Steps to Install OS on iDRAC6 V Flash

1. Ensure the V Flash Enabled Option is selected.
2. Initialize the iDRAC6 Flash card.
3. Create New Empty Partition.
4. Format the Empty partition (Ensure Read only option is unchecked).
5. Select the emulation type for the partition as Hard Disk.
6. Attach new V Flash Partition.
7. V Flash partition would be detected as Hard Disk while installing OS.
8. Post installation completion set V Flash Hard Disk as First Boot Device.

Ensure that you only insert a vFlash SD card or standard SD card in the iDRAC6 Enterprise card slot. If you insert a card in any other format (example, Multi- Media Card (MMC)), the following error message is displayed when you initialize the card: An error has occurred while initializing SD card.

The vFlash SD cards and standard SD cards are supported. A vFlash SD card refers to the card that supports the new enhanced vFlash features. A standard SD card refers to a normal off-the-shelf SD card that supports only limited vFlash features. With vFlash SD card, you can create up to 16 partitions. You can provide a label name for the partition when you create it and can perform a range of operations to manage and use the partitions. A vFlash SD card can be of any size up to 8GB. Each partition size can be up to 4GB. A standard SD card can be of any size but supports only one partition. The size of the partition is limited to 256MB. The label name for the partition is VFLASH by default.

Note: You will receive a "RAC0130 Error occurred creating partition" error if you name the partition "VFLASH", as this name is reserved.

When create partition is in-progress, the progress or status is not displayed. A page indicating the progress
percentage is displayed. A page indicating the progress percentage is displayed. An error message is displayed if:

• The card is write-protected.
• The label name matches the label of an existing partition.
• A non-integer value is entered for the partition size, the value exceeds the available space on the card, or the requested partition size is greater than 4GB.
• An initialize operation is in-progress.