SD card for iDRAC 6 Enterprise - Dell vFlash or "normal" SD card?

Question

I have got the built-in iDRAC 6 Express working on our Dell R610's, but I am about to get some iDRAC 6 Enterprise cards, which can be gotten fairly cheaply on eBay (around 20 USD at the time of writing).

I see that these iDRAC enterprise cards have a capability to use a Dell vFlash SD card. The 8GB dell SD cards look like they are around 35 USD on eBay (I have no idea what a new card costs, and of course the ones on eBay could have had quite a lot of use). For comparison the first 8GB SD card on Amazon I looked at was around 8 USD.

So my question is: can a normal SD card be substituted for the vFlash SD card in the iDRAC? If so, are their any other substitute cards I should consider?

Solution 1

Yes, pretty much any SD card will be usable in your Dell R610. However, an important consideration is that if you use a normal SD card, your iDRAC will only be able to access a single, 256 MB partition on that card.

If you use a vFlash card, your iDRAC will be able to access up to 16 partitions on the SD card, with a maximum partition size of 4 GB.

If you do consider alternate cards, you really want to consider the card's data transfer rating ("Speed Class"). It is extremely infuriating to wait an hour to load your OS ISO because someone put a Speed Class 2 SD card in to save $10.

Solution 2

Yes any SD card will do with the limitation sated above.

However, should you wish to save hardware configuration data to avoid the "replacement parts detected for device" message during boot, you need a vFlash card as licensing for this feature is tied to vFlash; a normal SD card just wont do.

Comments

[sysjas]

Perfect! Thanks for the links! You have answered the question pretty definitively for me.

[Strepsils]

IMO another option with bootable USB stick will be good as well kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/…. And also using as using USB sticks for VMware installation starwindsoftware.com/blog/…