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Posts Tagged ‘blades’

HP Virtual Connect Firmware upgrade may cause Server Profiles to be unassigned causing a network outage

July 25th, 2013 4 comments

HP has released a serious advisory that upgrading certain Virtual Connect firmware may cause server profiles to be unassigned which will cause a a network outage for your blades.

http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/template.PAGE/public/kb/docDisplay/?javax.portlet.begCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken&javax.portlet.endCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken&javax.portlet.prp_ba847bafb2a2d782fcbb0710b053ce01=wsrp-navigationalState%3DdocId%253Demr_na-c03708135-2%257CdocLocale%253D%257CcalledBy%253D&javax.portlet.tpst=ba847bafb2a2d782fcbb0710b053ce01&ac.admitted=1373876123412.876444892.492883150

The issue occurs when you have both single dense and double dense servers in your chassis and you are upgrading from Virtual Connect firmwares 3.10-3.60 up to Virtual Connect firmwares 3.70-3.75.

The upgrade process will complete successfully however the single dense server profiles will become unassigned which will cause a network outage for those specific server blades.

In order to fix this you will need to power down the affected blades, reassign the server profiles and power on the blades again! Ouch!

This doesn’t affect you if you are upgrading  from Virtual Connect firmware 3.70 to later firmware or going from Virtual Connect firmware 3.10 to anything below 3.70 such as 3.60 and won’t affect you if you only have single dense servers or double dense servers but not a mixture.

Virtual Connect firmware 4.01 which has been recently released fixes this but has a whole raft of new features that you may not be ready to implement so its worth being aware of this issue.

Categories: Flex-10, HP Tags: , , ,

HP G7/Gen8 Blades: New Emulex firmware 4.2.401.2215 released

July 25th, 2013 No comments

HP has released a new firmware version 4.2.401.2215 of its Emulex OneConnect 10Gb Ethernet Controller which is used in HP G7 and Gen8 Blades.

The built in LOM adapter names on a G7 Blade server are NC553i or NC551i and the Mezz card is NC554m. The CNA LOM added to a Gen8 Blade server is HP554FLB.

This firmware is required if you are going to be using the new dual hop FCoE features in Virtual Connect 4.01.

The firmware update process is offline and requires you to boot from an Emulex OneConnect bootable .ISO which can be downloaded from:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=329290&prodSeriesId=5033632&prodNameId=5033634&swEnvOID=54&swLang=8&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=co-117280-1

The following issues have been resolved from the previous firmware version 4.2.401.605

  1. Fixed VMware PSOD ESX 4.1/5.0/5.1 seen on BL465cG7, BL685cg7 servers with BE2 based card. For more details see the following Customer Advisory
  2. Fixed FW memory leak with multiple logins to a redirected target
  3. Fixed FW to allow setting Speed/Duplex to Auto/Auto
  4. Fixed Fw to allow Bonding with Citrix platforms
  5. Fixed FW to allow upgrades of version 4.x to 4.x+ without requiring cold boot
  6. Fixed UEFI to not require 2nd reset
  7. Fixed UEFI driver version reported
  8. Fixed FW to prevent LOMS at 10G from negotiating 1G with Blade switches
  9. Fixed FW for BE3 to report correct values of ethernet stat “In Range” error
  10. Fixed FW to boot from secondary iSCSI when selected
  11. Fixed FW iSCSI boot failure from secondary target when primary target given is incorrect
  12. Fixed UEFI NIC default settings retention
  13. Fixed FW hang during boot with SLES 10 SP4
  14. Fixed FW error while performing Shared Uplink Set port remove/add test

I’ve updated my post: HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 & VMware ESX(i) pre-requisites

Categories: Flex-10, HP Tags: , , , ,

New HP Emulex drivers and firmware released for VMware ESXi 5.x

March 7th, 2013 No comments

Emulex has released a new set of drivers and firmware for use on Gen8 and G7 HP Servers including blades with both VMware ESXi 5.0 and 5.1.

Driver:
Emulex be2net nic driver version 4.2.327.0 which is included in the HP Custom Image for VMware ESXi 5.1 February 2013: VMware-ESXi-5.1.0-799733-HP-5.34.23.iso and HP Custom Image for VMware ESXi 5.0.0 Update 2 February 2013VMware-ESXi-5.0.0-Update2-914586-HP-5.27.20.iso or can be downloaded separately from VMware.

Emulex has also released a newer driver version 4.4.231.0 which is available from VMware but this isn’t supported as yet by HP.

Firmware:
Emulex firmware version 4.2.401.605 which can be updated using the Emulex OneConnect-Flash .ISO.

There was a 4.2.401.6 released but this has been superseded by 4.2.401.605 which fixes a number of issues.

I have done an extensive update of my HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 & VMware ESX(i) pre-requisites post which includes these new Emulex drivers and firmware.

Categories: ESX, Flex-10, HP, VMware Tags: , , , , ,

UK VMUG – 15 November 2012 & I’ll be presenting

October 30th, 2012 No comments

Update: 11 November – WIN A FANTASTIC PRIZE!!!

During my session I will be giving away a voucher for FREE access to all on-demand recorded VMworld 2012 sessions and content which includes:

  1. Videos (general sessions and super sessions)
  2. Flash presentations w/ audio over slides (all breakout sessions)
  3. PDF downloads (all sessions and labs)
  4. MP3 podcats (all sessions)
  5. Demo videos and scripts (select sessions and labs)

Just attend my session and have a chance to win this amazing prize, worth more than £500!!

Registration is now open for the second annual combined national UK VMUG is being held on Thursday 15th November 2012 from 8am-5pm with a pre-event vCurry reception the night before from 7pm-9pm.

The location is the same as last year:motorcycle

National Motorcycle Museum
Coventry Road
Bickenhill, Solihull, West Mids,
England
B92 0EJ

The day promises to be packed full of in-depth technical sessions, demonstrations and partner exhibits with a speaking line-up that can only be beaten by VMworld itself.

There are presentations by some of VMware’s premiere knowledge experts, including resource and availability gurus Duncan Epping & Frank Denneman, VCDXs Hugo Phan & Aidan Dalgleish, Mr. VMware Storage, Cormac Hogan and automation luminaries Alan Renouf and William Lam along with many others.

You can hear all about VMware’s vision of the Software Defined Data Centre from VMware’s European Chief Technologist Joe Baguley as well as Staying Sharp in IT from well known EMC industry expert Scott Lowe.

What is also exciting is there are a large number of community presentations by independents giving you the real how-to from the trenches sans the marketing.

I’ll be presenting a session on vSphere Networking and Converged IO with Blade Servers. I will be going through how blade servers bring converged IO to vSphere Networking and what design options you have to ensure high performance and availability.

The other community presentations are:

Ricky El-Qasem | Creating VMware Apps for Novice Programmers

Chris Dearden | A Techie’s Guide to Getting the Most Out of IT Support

Mike Laverick | Building my vCloud Director Home Lab

Tom Howarth | Deep Dive on Desktop Design for VDI

VMUGs are fantastic days filled with information that is invaluable to any IT person working with virtualisation. It’s not just the presentations that are useful but the chance to network with fellow IT people and share problems and solutions. Every time I attend I come back with a list of things I’ve learnt.

You can see the full agenda and register here: http://www.myvmug.org/e/in/eid=106&source=5

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Categories: VMUG, VMware Tags: , , ,

HP G7 Blades: New Emulex firmware 4.1.402.20 released

July 2nd, 2012 20 comments

HP has released a new firmware version 4.1.402.20 of its Emulex OneConnect 10Gb Ethernet Controller which is used in HP G7 Blades.

The June HP Service Pack for ProLiant 2012.06.0(B) had a 4.1.402.8 firmware version so it looks like it only had a lifespan of a month and has now been superseded by 4.1.402.20.

Unfortunately it doesn’t look like the HP VMware Recipe for June has been updated http://vibsdepot.hp.com/hpq/recipes/June2012VMwareRecipe1.0.pdf

The installation is as before and requires you to boot off an .ISO and update manually. (I have a dream that one day…)

Before June the firmware version recommended was 4.0.493. I can’t tell what the enhancements are between 4.1.402.8 and 4.1.402.20 as the release notes for 4.1.402.20 only list the resolved issues from 4.0.493.

BladeEngine Firmware

  1. Increased RSS queues for Rhel drivers.
  2. Fixed W2K8 graceful shutdown on NC552 adapter.
  3. iSCSI not working when priority fields are used.
  4. 554FLR-SFP adapter, FCoE Path Multipath Recovery Failure, SLES11 SP1 x64
  5. FCoE port sometimes doesn’t login after VC module failover, w2k3
  6. Fix support for TEMP_DEAD and ALOM_FAN_ON_AUX on Gen 8 servers
  7. Correction to OCSD to prevent DMA conflicts with LPFC driver

PXE BIOS

  1. NC553i adapter using wrong IP for gateway during Tftp
  2. BE2/BE3 based adapters, PXE Hang
  3. BL465cG7 PXE boot stops and is not coming up in RDP

iSCSI BIOS

  1. SCSI SAN boot fails when DHCP Vendor Id is used for BL420cG8
  2. Smart Array shows EBDA Error when ELX iSCSI Boot LUN configured

UEFI NIC

  1. Dynamic link update is not working with NIC UEFI driver

Technical Tips

  1. When updating HP CN1000e and NC550SFP products, use either the OneConnect-flash.iso or the Elxflash Offline tools. Either method will update the ILO image for the Network Communications Services Interface (NCSI) side band support. This procedure requires a power cycle after flashing. This tip does not apply to network cards that are version 4.0.360.15 or later.
  2. Before you update your host drivers, update your firmware using the available online tools.

I’ve updated my post: HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 & VMware ESX(i) pre-requisites

Categories: ESX, Flex-10, HP, VMware Tags: , , , , ,

HP G7 Blade new Emulex be2net ESX(i) drivers 4.1.334.0 now supported

June 6th, 2012 5 comments

VMware recently released a new Emulex be2net driver version 4.1.334.0 for both ESX(i) 4.x and ESXi 5.x for the Emulex OneConnect 10Gb Ethernet Controller which is used in HP G7 Blades.

These new drivers were not supported by HP when released but HP has now certified this driver and included it its new HP ESXi images.

ESX(i) 4.x
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=DT-ESX4041-EMULEX-be2net-413340&productId=230
ESXi 5.x
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=DT-ESX50-EMULEX-be2net-413340&productId=229

I’ve updated my post: HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 & VMware ESX(i) pre-requisites

Categories: ESX, Flex-10, HP, VMware Tags: , , , , ,

New Emulex be2net drivers for ESX(i) 4.x and ESXi 5.x but they’re not supported yet for HP G7 Blades

May 2nd, 2012 32 comments

Update: 06 June 2012 – These drivers are now supported by HP – HP G7 Blade new Emulex be2net ESX(i) drivers 4.1.334.0 now supported

Update: 11 May 2012 to amend link and try work out HP support. Apologies I had the wrong ESX(i) version link in the original post and hadn’t properly investigated HP support for  Virtual Connect/FlexFabric which is confusing. Sorry, Sloppy me! 🙁

VMware has released a new Emulex be2net driver version 4.1.334.0 for both ESX(i) 4.x and ESXi 5.x for the Emulex OneConnect 10Gb Ethernet Controller which is used in HP G7 Blades. But, before you get too excited, HP has NOT certified these drivers for use with HP Virtual Connect and FlexFabric…I think.

You see in this page from VMware which was updated on 4 April 2012 the advice is to use the 4.0.306.0 driver for ESX(i) 4.x and 4.0.355.1 for ESXi 5.x
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2007397

This page however from VMware says for ESXi 5 driver version 4.0.355.1 isn’t supported for HP ProLiant G7 servers. It requires a new firmware version that is not currently available.
http://partnerweb.vmware.com/comp_guide2/detail.php?deviceCategory=io&productid=19067&vcl=true

but I think this is old as the HP advisory has been updated to say the 4.0.355.1 driver is supported
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c03005737

But in this document which looks like it has been written by HP, the 4.1.334 drivers for both versions ARE supported (but again with different firmware version numbers that don’t really tally up with what has been supported before)
http://partnerweb.vmware.com/programs/hcl/ESX_Flex_config.pdf

I’m thinking that this document may be a little premature as no other HP information has been updated to reflect support for the 4.1.334 drivers

So, just for your information, the 4.1.334 drivers can be downloaded from the following links when they may be supported:

ESX(i) 4.x:
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=DT-ESX4041-EMULEX-be2net-413340&productId=230

ESXi 5.x:
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details/dt_esxi50_emulex_be2net_413340/dHRAYndld3diZHBqaA==

But, I’m thinking the currently supported drivers are:

ESX(i) 4.x: version 4.0.306.0
http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/dt_esxi40_emulex_be2net_403060/ZHcqYnQqaGpiZEBlZA

ESXi 5.x: version 4.0.355.1
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details/dt_esxi50_emulex_be2net_413340/dHRAYndld3diZHBqaA==

I’ve updated my post: HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 & VMware ESX(i) pre-requisites

Categories: ESX, Flex-10, HP, VMware Tags: , , , , ,

New HP Blade Onboard Administrator 3.55 Firmware released

April 4th, 2012 2 comments

HP has released two new firmware updates for its blade chassis, 3.50 and 3.55.

These were both released on the same day.

3.50 was released to support Gen 8 blades and is required before you insert any Gen 8 blades into your enclosure (along with having Virtual Connect 3.51). There are also a lot of other fixes. You will also need to update HP SIM to at least 6.3 to be able to discover OAs from 3.30 up.

3.55 was released on the same day as it seems testing missed some issues with authentication and EBIPA (great!) so I’m not sure why 3.50 was released at all. Confusingly the release notes and fixes for 3.55 include all the information from 3.50 so its not immediately obvious what the difference is.

So, no point really even looking at 3.50 but rather going straight for 3.55 which can be downloaded from:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=329290&prodSeriesId=3188465&swItem=MTX-1ee4cda0b03447c6974e4ca184&prodNameId=3188475&swEnvOID=4040&swLang=8&taskId=135&mode=4&idx=3

Enhancements/New Features
Read more…

Categories: ESX, Flex-10, HP, VMware Tags: , , , , ,

New HP G7 Blade Emulex Nic 4.0.493.0 Firmware released

April 4th, 2012 4 comments

HP has released a new version of the firmware for G7 blades which use an Emulex be2net Nic rather than the Broadcom bnx2x Nic used in G6 blades.
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=329290&prodSeriesId=5033632&swItem=co-103088-1&prodNameId=5033634&swEnvOID=54&swLang=8&taskId=135&mode=3

This is an offline update so will require you to boot from an .ISO to apply the firmware update.

New Features

  1. Added support for the following operating systems: – RHEL 6.2

Resolved Issues from Firmware Version 4.0.360.15

  1. A file level restore (FLR) request sent to a BE3 device while rebooting an HP UX guest VM image caused a timeout event.
  2. When users tried to disable beaconing, they would receive a “Success” status even if beaconing had already been disabled.
  3. The CN1100e device using VLAN did not pass traffic using “copy”. This failed only in full power mode. Traffic only passed in auxiliary mode.
  4. The NC551 adapter failed to link with the 10Gb Pass-Thru module when using a 1Gb SFP transceiver.
  5. The CN1000e device occasionally lost connection to network-attached storage (NAS) volumes when running an FCoE protocol under heavy load.
  6. The FCoE port did not register as connected after repeated virtual connect (VC) module failovers.
  7. The Flex NIC required changes to the DCC method to keep the link down until the switch explicitly sent link up.
  8. A BL460c G7 array with P410i version 5.1x firmware would not boot from iSCSI if a logical drive was connected to it.

Known Issues

There are no known issues for this release.

Have a look at my updated post: HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 & VMware ESX(i) pre-requisites for information on all firmware & driver compatibility.

Categories: ESX, Flex-10, HP, VMware Tags: , , , , ,

HP ESXi 5.0 Update 1 customised image available for download

March 28th, 2012 3 comments

HP has updated its ESXi 5.0 image to include ESXi 5.0 Update 1.

The HP ESXi Offline Bundle for VMware ESXi 5.0 includes the latest HP Common Information Model (CIM) Providers, HP Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) driver, HP Compaq ROM Utility (CRU) driver, and the new HP Agentless Management Service (AMS).

https://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=HPVM09

Direct Download:
http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/template.PAGE/public/psi/swdDetails/?sp4ts.oid=4194638&spf_p.tpst=psiSwdMain&spf_p.prp_psiSwdMain=wsrp-navigationalState%3Dlang%253Den%257Ccc%253DUS%257CprodSeriesId%253D4194735%257CprodNameId%253D4194638%257CswEnvOID%253D4115%257CswLang%253D8%257CswItem%253DMTX-c14ba20dc6274cc38e3203c3cb%257Caction%253DdriverDocument&javax.portlet.begCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken&javax.portlet.endCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken

The latest versions are:

  • hp-smx-provider 500.02.10.61.43-434156
  • char-hpilo 500.9.0.0.9-1OEM.500.0.0.434156
  • char-hpcru 5.0.0.8-1OEM.500.0.0.434156
  • hp-ams-esx-500.9.0.0-55.434156

Enhancements:

  • Added support for:
    • HP ProLiant  BL460c Gen8 server
    • HP ProLiant DL360p Gen8 server
    • HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 server
    • HP ProLiant ML350p Gen8 server
    • HP ProLiant DL160 Gen8 server
  • Added the new HP Agentless Management Service
  • Added the following support to the HP CIM Providers:
    • HP iLO4 (Integrated Lights-Out)
    • HP SmartSSD Wear Gauge
    • HP SmartDrive
    • Support for additional Power Supply
Categories: ESX, Flex-10, HP, VMware Tags: , , ,