ESXi 5.1 / 5.5 u1,2,3 on HP BL460c G7 - psod

[PieterjanMonten]

Hi,

I'm upgrading some of our older blades (bl460c G8 and G9's passed without a hitch) to esxi5.5, but the installer keeps crashing.

I've been trying every update of the 5.1 and 5.5 customised HP images, to no avail.

Installer seems to launch, but then PSOD's as soon as the network drivers load (that's what I concluded). I applied the latest Proliant service pack (2015.10.0), so firmwares are as up to date as can be (interesting note: with the older 2011 firmware the host installed successfully, but network was unusable)

Some 5.5u3 (hp cust) screens:

Here the installer stops loading:

And then it psod's:

Any suggestion or other resource I could give a try (Tried some vanilla esxi iso's as well, didn't help) ? I'd really like these ones to join the main cluster, a RAM upgrade and they could be running smoothly for another couple of years.

[PieterjanMonten]

A small update: 5.1 u2 and u3 , while taking a long time to load at the "loading be2net" step, do load, but then complain there's no network adapter to be found.

Thought for a second it was going to be a fine day after all..

[pterlisten]

Hello,

can you post a detailed config of the blade hardware? What mezzanine cards do you use?

[PieterjanMonten]

Hi Patrick, thanks for your response.

Not really much to see, there aren't any mezzanine cards, we use a single [sic] VC Flex-10 10Gb ethernet interconnect module (part 455880-B21). This is the hardware overview from the enclosure administrator (c3000):

So we have, besides standard components :

• 2x Intel Xeon X5670
• 49152MB DDR3 RDIMM ECC (to be upgraded)
• Smart Array P410i RAID + 2x 146GB 15k SAS + battery pack
• NIC's are identified as: HP NC553i 10Gb FlexFabric Adaptor, using the converged network iSCSI personality (normally multiple NIC's are used, but for now they only provide standard LAN access)

Up until this night, VC was using firmware 4.10. I was hoping upgrading to 4.45 would help, but that failed to have any impact (besides me erroneously believing the vcenter server crashed)

[PieterjanMonten]

Finally found a related discussion:

Vsphere 5.5 and Emulex OneConnect 10Gb NIC trouble

I'll try to use the prescribed firmware & driver NIC versions (currently Emulex v10.5.155.0)

[PieterjanMonten]

Ok, trouble was definitely the v10.5.155.0 Emulex firmware for the 553i CNA adapter.

I successfully downgraded it using a OneConnect-Flash iso ( OneConnect-Flash-4.9.311.20.iso ) available here: Drivers & Software - HP Support Center.

The host OS (server 2012 I installed just to test it out) finally recognized the NIC and started scanning the network, and the esxi5.5u3 Hp Cust. install loads just fine.

Still, hard to imagine how HP can ship a service pack with a firmware that just fails under any conceivable OS.

As I downgraded to the 2012.10 SPP (Nic firmware didn't downgrade...)  I'll patch back up to spp 2015.6 and just go backwards until I find the most recent working SPP for the BL460Cg7.

With a bit of luck, the G7's will join the cluster for Christmas !

[PieterjanMonten]

So, just to  finish on a nice touch: esxi5.5u3 HP Cust installs just fine with SPP 2015.6.

I had some trouble updating the firmware, the SPP iso couldn't load through the OA firmware manager, so I had to launch the update manually with the remote console (>4Gb isos are marked as being unreliable in the 4.40 OA firmware)

[PieterjanMonten · Accepted solution]

My bad, this is what was actually happening:

• The OA firmware management somehow mangled the update, specifically of the emulex driver, which made it unusable and almost un-updatable
• Only way to put the emulex CNA's back in a working state seems to be by using the OneConnect flash iso (OneConnect-Flash-4.9.311.20.iso) available here: http://h20564.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public/detail?swItemId=co_128972_1
• Once back in a working state, the latest SPP (2015.10 at this time) can be mounted with the remote console to perform the update.
• Once done, and even with the latest Emulex v10.5.155.0 firmware, ESXi 5.5u3 HP runs fine.

One signal that the emulex firmware is corrupted is the repeated firmware boot message (which should only appear once) :

[bleschber]

I'm in the exact same situation you were in, however I cannot find "OneConnect-Flash-4.9.311.20.iso" anywhere.  The link you posted to HP no longer works.  Do you happen to still have a copy of that ISO I could have?

Thanks