VC 3.51 experiences with VMware?

[Bjorn44]

Hello all,

I had some problems with BL620c G7 blades hangning during reboot. Digging down in the problem things led to firmware upgrade of NIC and drivers, but also blade infrastructure. During update I updated to 3.51 but later on found out that its not yet supported by vSphere 5, 3.18 is: http://partnerweb.vmware.com/programs/hcl/ESX_Flex_config.pdf

OA is upgraded to 3.32

Blades are upgraded with blade firmware dvd 9.30

VC 3.51

Blades (BL620c G7, BL460c G6 and G7) are all running ESXi 5.0 with latest NIC drivers.

Running a bit too new firmware that is... anyone has any experience/problems with 3.51 and ESXi? Or should I downgrade to 3.18?

Thanks

/Bjorn

[Psychonaut]

Your blades are not at the latest firmware - they transitioned over to the Service Pack for Proliant format, you can download it here -  http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/spp/index.html.

I don't know if that will fix your issue (I've seen this issue and my 460's are at 9.30 - to be upgraded tomorrow; and my VC's are at 3.30) - but you can give it a shot.

[Bjorn44]

Thanks, but the issue seems to be VLAN and driver related. BL620 blades has the latest NIC firmware and driver for ESXi 5 and the second most recent BIOS. I have a case open with HP support. They will most likely recommend me to downgrade VC to the ESXi 5 supported  3.18.

But if there are alot of positive experiences on 3.51, perhaps we can continue with that version.

[Hongjun Ma]

I suggest you stay in 3.51 unless HP support give you any particular reason to download VC firmware.

After 3.18, VC had release 3.30 which is a new feature release introducing many features.

3.51 is the next release after 3.30, which is mainly a bug fix version for 3.30

This table is outdated as far as I can see. VC 3.50 was internally tested but never released for public use. 3.51 should be very close to 3.50 with very few bug fixes. I'll forward this link to HP VC team to see if they can sync up with Vmware to update it.

Also, for current G7 LOM, the recommended firmware version is 4.0.360.15. not the version mentioned in this doc.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodNameId=4324854&prodTypeId=3709945&prodSeriesId=4296125&swLang=8&taskId=135&swEnvOID=54

Please take a look at HP CloudSystem Matrix 6.3.1 release notes. This is HP Cloud solution which has gone through extensive testing internally and recommend to customer for firmware/drivers to be used.

http://bizsupport2.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c03089459/c03089459.pdf

you can find NIC driver for ESXi5 download link from my blog pointer

http://hongjunma.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/hp-emulex-cna-firmware-and-driver-for-esxi5-0/

So in summary, I suggest you stay in VC3.51 unless HP support confirmed something wrong with VC firmware and also try to use HP SPP 2012.01 for updates for all firmwares mentioned.

[Hongjun Ma]

I had to post in another thread because of posting size limitation.

NIC firmware:

[Hongjun Ma]

NIC driver

[ricdanger21]

Only problem I had was that after the upgrade from 3.30 to 3.51, half of the FlexNICs were down.

It took a reboot for each server to bring it up again.

This happened on all ESXi 5 servers. XenServer and Windows Servers where not affected.

Everything is working fine after that.