As much as I love vanity pictures of a server being assembled, we are going to skip that and jump straight to the BIOS and RAID configuration of an assembled server. This is a very important first step when setting up any server. However, since this has already been covered by manufacturers and bloggers extensively, I will just be listing the checklist of items I always check with some basic guidance. If you aren’t familiar with 100% of these settings, that’s fine. That's what search engines are for! 

I'm finally getting around to my first post! This is a simple one to kick off a series of posts for setting up a Hyper-V server in a standalone configuration with an onboard raid controller. We will get into some pretty fun stuff later (think NIC teaming and virtual switches, optimal storage allocation units, and some fun powershell), but for now we'll look at a piece by piece hardware breakdown of a server I have actually deployed, and my selection criteria for each item. Let's get started...