Cant boot to ESXi 6.7 HPE BL360c Gen8

[M4T]

Hi community,

I just received 16 BL360c Gen8 HPE blades. they all have 64gb sandisk USB thumb drives installed with ESXi 6.7 U1 but I cant seem to get the servers to boot to the USB even when it shows the options 1) 2) 3) 4) etc 3) is to boot to USB but it just seems to always boot to the network. I changed the iLO4 boot options to the USB drive but it doesn't seem to boot to the USB it still does the network boot.

is there a setting somewhere to change in the bios I remember I had a similar issue with the DL360 Gen7 servers but cant remember how I did it. as these are newer.

matto

[a_p_]

Please don't mind me asking, but are you sure that ESXi has already been installed on the thumb drives?

Also note that ESXi 6.7 and newer is not supported for the BL460 Gen8 (see VMware Compatibility Guide - System Search ).

André

[M4T]

hi andre

I did a clean install of esxi on the thumb drive I installed via the virtual console

the installation process completed without any errors or messages im assuming its compatible as I have older systems that work with 6.7 u1

matt

[M4T]

hi andre

I just tried to reinstall on one blade again and it shows esxi 6.7 u1 is already installed on the thumb drive.

ive never had this issue before specially with dell servers.

mat

[sk84]

For Gen7 servers and below, legacy USB support had to be disabled in the BIOS first. This is no longer the case for Gen8. But you can still check if the USB boot support is enabled in the RBSU:

See: https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=mmr_sf-EN_US000006562

You can also try changing the boot mode between UEFI and Legacy:

https://www.techazine.com/2015/02/12/adjusting-uefi-boot-order-on-proliant-dl580-gen8/

But apart from the boot problems, I don't think ESXi 6.7 is supported for Gen8 servers (as others have already mentioned, too). The 8th generation of HPE servers is very old and at least the Proliant DL series in Gen8 is supported only up to ESXi 6.0. So I'm not sure if you really want to run ESXi 6.7 on it.

[M4T · Accepted solution]

hi Sebastian,

I fixed it I remember I had to use shift+o in the esxi set up and use "formatwithmbr" for it to work it works fine now booted and in use 6.7 u1

matt