Cisco UCS, direct attached storage and VMware v6.5

Recently got assigned the task of rebuilding a Cisco UCS C240-m3sx server.  It has a MegaRAID 12gb RAID controller, otherwise known as "Cisco 12G SAS Modular Raid Controller" or UCSCMRAID12G.  No problem, loaded it up with the ESXi v6.5u2 Cisco OEM ISO, and installed it to a SD card. 

Only issue was that ESXi would not see the RAID disks.  Well since this machine was previously a Windows Server, I booted off of a Linux utility and did a secure wipe of the drive, no luck.  Went into the RAID card, blew away the virtual disk, recreated it, re-initialized, still no luck.  Then I upgraded all of the firmware on the machine, including the RAID card.  No change.

After some Google-foo I found a Cisco KB; Apparently the drivers for the RAID card were not included in the ESX 6.5u2 & u3 ISOs!!!!  The fix was to download and install ESX v6.5u4.  Ok, did that, same problem!

Called up VMware support, ran a bunch of things.  Specifically downloaded the driver from the Cisco support site and installed it, which was slightly different than what was currently installed.  lsi-mr3-7.710.08.00-1OEM.650.0.0.4598673.x86_64.vib   No change.  VMware support, gave up and said call Cisco.  Problem with that was our support contract expired and was in the process of being renewed.

In the meantime, I tried ESXi v6.5u3 standard, not the Cisco customized version; no change.  Then I happened to try ESXi v6.7 and it works!!!!  The caveat​ is that our vCenter (v6.5U2) will not work with ESXi v6.7 hosts.  I also find it a bit odd that the ESX still reports the unknown enclosure.  See bellow.  So I am left to conclude that every flavor of ESX v6.5 has a flawed driver.

Summary:
Works:
VMware-VMvisor-Installer-201912001-15160138.x86_64 v6.7.u3
VMware_ESXi_6.7.0_14320388_Custom_Cisco_6.7.3.1
VMware_ESXi_6.7.0_10302608_Custom_Cisco_6.7.1.2

Does not work:
VMware-ESXi-6.5.0_13932383_Custom_Cisco-6.5.3.1
VMware-ESXi-6.5.0-9298722-Custom-Cisco-6.5.2.2
VMware-VMvisor-Installer-201908001-14320405.x86_64 v6.5.0u3a
also the driver we manually download & installed directly from the Cisco support page.

Microsoft Surface teardown

Microsoft Surfaces are horrible, well in terms of repair.  I got one from an end user where the screen was totally trashed.  Looked like a car ran over it!  Before it can be recycled, we need to erase the hard drive.  The screens are glued on by some incredible glue!  After watching several YouTube Videos, the trick seems to be to heat the heck out of with a heat guy, cut the seem, and about 1/3 of the time the screen survives.  In my case I didn't need to be careful, as the screen was already in a million pieces, I just didn't want any glass shards in my hands!  Thick rubber gloves were worn. 

After many Torx-5 screws, the treasure....a 256gb NVMe SSD drive, that I will stick into another machine and securely wipe.

Here is the results of tearing down an older model.