vSphere and HP Proliant BL460c G6

[mas1]

Any known issues installing vSphere on HP ProLiant BL460c G6 on c7000 enclosure? Network connectivity problems?

[FrozenJoe]

I just finished installing vSphere on that exact hardware and have had no real issues. In fact, it has been as close to a perfect install as computers will allow.

We have 2 c7000 encolosures with 3 blades (2 production, 1 DR) using Flex-10 modules for network connectivity and a Cisco Fabric-Switch for the Fibre-Channel that connects to an HP MSA 2212f.

The blades have redundant internal hard drives for ESX + 1 local datastore, dual Quad-core Xeon i7 @ 2.667 Ghz with 48 GB of RAM each.

There are a couple of things I would note for the install.

1. Setup VirtualConnect before you install ESX. In my experience, I can modify bandwidth of each interface without prolems but adding/removing/moving interfaces within VC causes ESX to freak out.

2. Disconnect the MSA before you install/reinstall ESX. For some reason, during the install of ESX it would continually format the MSA drives even though we told ESX to use only the local drives only.

3. If you want to add the HP monitoring software to ESX, it can be done but was a somewhat lengthly process. The HP techs we had here during the install did not know how to install the tools so I had to develop an install process manually and then show them how I did it.

4. It has been impossible to connect physical devices into USB ports and port them back to the guests OSes causing a minor headache developing a backup solution.

Message was edited by: FrozenJoe for notes added.

[mas1]

Thank you very much!

[VinnyVH]

My 2 cent:

- As far is I know, disconnecting any SAN storage device during ESX installation is a best practise.

- There is a ESXi version made by HP which incorporates CIM providers: http://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductsList.do?category=VIRTVMW

[JohnGibson]

Ive just hit a problem with ESXi and I think this may be the solution.

I kept getting vmnic0 or vmnic1 ports beign disabled on the 3120 cisco switches when doig random things... like rebooting the ESXi host... more testing needed but these drivers apply to the 460c G6 with ESXi

[supahted]

Hi John,

Did the new bnx2 driver solve the problem for you? It looks like i am hitting the same problem with BL460c G1 and BL460c G6 servers.

Regards,

Ted Steenvoorden

blog:

[Dreadnought]

I'm having troubles at some customer's sites installing Vsphere ESX 4.0u1 directly to BL460c G6 servers.

The problem is simple:

• The new Flex-10 nics firmware does not support old driver (bnx2x 1.45xx) and from HP advisories you have to use at least the bnx2x driver ver 1.48 or better the recomended 1.52xx; these drivers supports DCC (Device Control Channel) the new firmware method to manage the nic connections from the OS side to the hardware side

• i tried to install ESX 4.0.0 and it comes up in the installation seeing 8nics, that's correct unless all the 8 nics are disconnected (driver bnx2x 1.45 in ESX 4.0 is not compatible with DCC feature of the new Flex-10 firmware)

• so I tried to install ESX 4.0.1 but surprisingly it does not recognise the nics at all (installation quits).

Here's a brief from a link i've found on google:

At this point I've started to think that ESX 4.0u1 does not contains the bnx2x driver, and I seached for an addon driver.

I found these:

But when i try to add them during installation as an additional driver, the setup program says that it's not a VMware driver CD

O_o

The workaround isn't the best: you have to downgrade to older version of Broadcom Flex10 Firmware (which is buggy) and start from ESX 4.0.1 or 4.0.0

[Dreadnought]

Found a solution: there's a bug in the way which the installer links to the correct device (/dev/srXX) when you insert a new CD-ROM.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=101740...

Also using JAVA applet virtual media is better than using the ActiveX ILO-2 virtual media

[LCWilson]

HP released a newer version of the firmware, 2.2.6 which resolves the problem. Here is a link to the firmware download: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=37...

Once we applied this firmware we were able to install without any issues.

[phoenix123]

Hi,

we want to install Vsphere 4 on BL460c with PXE-Installation. But i dont know how to insert the drivers into the Vsphere 4 CD. Has anybody a hint?

Thanks,

Daniel

[LeeCarey]

Hi All, Getting the same issue with the BL460C G6 not being able to recognise any NIC's during an installation of U1 and U2. I've obtained the latest firmware version for the NIC but how do you apply the online f/w to the NIC's if no OS is available. USB Disk?

P.S VMware support have said that adding drivers to the PXE installation is not possible and would need to be performed during the manual installation.

L

[msemon1]

How about adding drivers with Magic ISO and then burn to CD or mount?

Mike

[DSTAVERT]

If the NICs are from HP or the embedded ones then you should download the firmware CD from HP for the blade model and ESX(i) version. Do select VMware as the OS as there are times when a specific version of the firmware is required not just the latest.

[LeeCarey]

Re-applying the HP F/w 9.00 CD appears to have resolved the issue