HP ProLiant BL460c Gen9: MicroSD card missing during ESXi 5.5 setup

Today, I was at a customer to prepare a two node vSphere cluster for some MS SQL server tests. Nothing fancy, just two HP ProLiant BL460c Gen9 blades and two virtual volumes from a HP 3PAR. Each blade had two 400 GB SSDs, two 64 GB M.2 SSDs and a 1 GB MicroSD card. Usually, I install ESXi to a SD card. In this case, a MicroSD card. The SSDs were dedicated for PernixData FVP. Although I saw the MicroSD card in the boot menu, ESXi doesn’t showed it as a installation target.

I’ve read a lot about similar observations of other users, but no solution seemed to be plausible. It’s not a solution to switch from UEFI to legacy BIOS or play with power management settings. BIOS and ILO firmware were up to date. But disabling USB3 support seemed to be a possible solution.

You can disable USB3 support in the RBSU.

After a reboot, the MicroSD card appeared as installation target during the ESXi setup.

I never noticed this behaviour with ProLiant DL360 Gen9, 380 Gen9, 560 Gen9 or 580 Gen9. I only saw this with BL460c Gen9. The affected blade servers had System ROM I36 05/06/2015 and I36 09/24/2015, as well as ILO4 2.30 installed.