c7000 Blade Encoloure Power Settings Change

[Chartwell]

Hi

We have a fully loaded c7000 Blade Chassis with:
- 6x PSUs (drawn form 2 power sources)
- 16x Blades

We are consuming a lot of power on the blade chassis even though most of the blades are just idling...

After a firmware update we noticed that there is now a "Enable Dynamic Power" option which we hope will save us power... We also have "Power Caps"....

My question is, if we make changes here, will this affect our blades, eg power them off if there is not enough power?

We do not want our blades to power off as they are in a live production environment.

If it helps, we are in "Power Supply Redundant" mode with no power caps and Dynamic Power is disabled.

Thanks

[Jan Soska]

hello,
we have similar enviroment but do not see any high comsuption while servers are mostly idle. Do you have latest firmwares and ilos installed for blades as well?
What energy saving do you have enabled in server bioses?

Jan

[Chartwell]

We are running a semi new firmware on the blade chassis 3.12 Nov 15th 2010...

The blades them selfs are running an older firmware 1.70 Nov 2nd 2010 which we cannot upgrade without a planned maintenance window.
I also am not able to check the BIOS as these are live production servers.
The ILO for these blades report that we are using "HP Dynamic Power Savings Mode" however...

[Jan Soska]

hello,
I would sugest update OA firmware 3.21 and ilo firmwares (2.05 if ilo2) on all servers, you can done it live without reboot, just check if your bioses are inside blade compatibility at http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/blades/bladesystemupdatestable.html .

btw, could you post your current energy consumption screenshot from OA?

Jan

[Trygve Henriksen]

Update the ILO Firmware NOW!

Versions prior to 1.81 has a bug relating to power and thermal which can cause the chassis fans go into a 'Stress-test jet engine simulator mode'(all of them running at around 80%... the noise is 'not good'... )

[RazDaz]

Hi,

As already mentioned in the thread you will be required to update all the firmware on your blades, you must have the latest firmware on the chassis (looks like you have the latest), this is very important to ensure that when you "ENABLE" dynamic power nothing abnormal happens.

thanks

[RazDaz]

Here is an interesting white paper regarding Best Practices for Dynamis Power

[Chartwell]

Updating the firmware one of the blades caused a problem...

Using the latest firmware DVD 9.20B the update process appear to perform its usual tasks... I lost communication to ilo during the upgrade as expected. However iLO has not came back! :'(

There is a nasty red X on the blade now under the c7000 Web Console with the error message "Error - lost communication with iLO."

I cannot reset the server nor get any control over it what to ever.

I see no DHCP requests from the iLO or NICs nor has the OS appear to have rebooted...

I have no on-hands with the system at the moment... Arghhh! HELP!

[Jan Soska]

hello,
have you tried reseat the blade or move it to another slot?

Jan

[Chartwell]

I have no on-hands support nor access to the blade chassis for the next 12 hours... :(