NC553i FlexNIC LOM's - RHEL Support

[sgunelius]

I just finished an install of RHEL 5.4 on a new BL460 G7 and discovered the LOM's weren't recognized during install.  I discovered that the driver is available in source rpm from HP (hp-be2net-2.104.277.1-2.src.rpm), but I while I was able to load the packages for the build environment, I had no success using their instructions to compile and install the driver.  I even opened a call to HP technical support, but their Linux expertise is almost as poor as mine.

The LOMs were finally identifed after several reboots and the server is on the network, but the devices are now identified as shown below and I assume this isn't a very stable configuration:

Description                                                                   Type                      Device  Status

ServerEngines Corp. Unknown device 0710         Ethernet              eth0       ok

ServerEngines Corp. Unknown device 0710         Ethernet              eth1       ok

HP technical support recommended that I open a call with Red Hat technical support, but I thought I would post to the forums first.

[Jimmy Vance]

Minimum supported RHEL versions are 5.5 and 6.0 for the BL460c G7

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Technical Exceptions HP ProLiant & BladeSystem Server
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/linux/supportmatrix/rhel/exceptions/rhel-exceptions.html

http://www.hp.com/go/proliantlinux

[sgunelius]

Jimmy,

I was worried that might be the case when I saw the OS matrix, but our development team has been sticking with 5.4 because that's the version qualified with Oracle ASM.  I'll have to see if they can move to at least 5.5 and if I get a workaround from Red Hat tech support for the existing release, I'll post that.  Thanks.

Cheers,

Scott

[gunelius]

Red Hat technical support gave us the same response as HP regarding the OS support matrix.  Fortunately we discovered that our software was compatible with point releases above our installed 5.4, so we used "yum update" to perform an in-place upgrade.  We had hoped it would only perform a single-step upgrade to the minimum supported release (5.5), but apparently this method upgrades to the latest point release (5.7).  The HP NC553i FlexNIC LOMs now show a description of "Emulex Corporation OneConnect 10Gb NIC (be3)" for eth0 and eth1.

Scott