Very slow boot on ISO mounted virtual Media

[nowakowski]

I want to boot a blade on a WinPE prepared for automatic blade / iLO2 configuration.
I made a WinPE ISO, and it start in 30 seconds on a dummy VM.

When I use iLO2 or Virtual Media to mount my WinPE ISO, the blade need up to 10 minutes to load WinPE !

I tried to :
- put the WinPE ISO on my PC, and on another blade on the same enclosure
- I upgraded iLO2 firmware to 1.60
- I can't upgrade HPOA firmare for today.
- check netwrok - no network collisions detected.

Harware used: c7000 - bl460c - HPOA connected to blade's Cisco 3020

Thanks for any help / suggestion
Laurent

[Terence Tsao]

Hi Nowakowski ,

Virtual media mounted via iLO2 and iLO2 transfers these ISO image using 128 bit encryption that makes slow performance.
Regards.

Terence

[nowakowski]

Thank you, it explains some of our problems...

[karim h · Accepted solution]

To speed up the boot process you can host the ISO image on a IIS5+ webserver and tell the ILO card to boot directly from a webserver URL. This process is documented in the ILO CLI User Guide. This is generally 3x faster than using the ILO Java or ActiveX applet to mount an image.

* You will need an ILO advanced license to do this.

1. SSH into the ILO interface using Putty or similiar
2. type 'cd /map1'
3. type 'cd oemhp_vm1'
4. type 'cd cddr1'
5. type 'show'
6. type 'set oemhp_image=http://webserver/path/to/iso/boot.iso'
7. type 'set oemhp_boot=connect' (to mount the image now)
8. type 'power reset' to reset the server

[NJK-Work]

Hi Karim,

I am trying this technique using the CLI but it does not work. I followed your commands verbatim - but does not go.

Is there anything special I need to do on the IIS website to make hosting ISO files work?

Thanks
Nelson

[NJK-Work]

Nevermind - found the answer in the CLI manual. I had to enable ISO as a MIME type in IIS 5.

Thanks
Nelson

[NJK-Work]

Well, I got it to boot from IIS mounted ISO but it is still slow. In fact it seems slower. Any other suggestions out there?

Nelson

[utopiazz]

Do you have any proxy servers enabled on the client? If so disable proxy for the ILO IP adress.

/J

[JimTonic]

Yes its pretty slow, I did not noticed any
performance gain by using the http aaproach,
network utilizations stays down at around 3% on a gigabit network.

:(

maybe a future version of ILO firmware will speed things up - hopefully.

Jim

[RoxySchram]

I know this is an older thread but I wanted to put in some feedback that might help some others down the road. I got tired of Windows taking forever to install when using the Java applet and I couldn't get my server too boot from a Windows USB.  I tried the instructions for mounting an ISO via the CLI which everything went great until the server tried to boot from the ISO. After pressing F11 and selecting the CD-Rom option, it would give me the nice little "Press any key to boot from the CD/DVD" like you would get. But at that point iLO would drop everything that was put into the CLI for mounting an ISO. So I found a work around.

1. Mount the ISO with the Java applet.
2. Let the computer boot to the very first screen inside the Windows installer.
3. Disconnect from the VM ISO.
4. Plug in your Windows USB.
5. Wait 30 seconds and then continue with the install.

Windows instantly picks up the USB installer for me and takes over from there. And it's super fast. :)