HP BL680c G5 Illegal Opcode

[Stuart Munday]

Hi,

We have two BL680c G5 blades that have been running VMware ESXi 5.5 for the past few years.  Recently, they were powered down and removed from the enclosure.

When they were re-inserted into the same enclosure and powered on, they both had a red screen illegal opcode error.  The only thing that had changed was the fibre channel mezzanine cards had been swapped between the two blades.

The cards were swapped back, but they still had the Illegal Opcode error.

After many attempts to get them booted, I discovered that if I removed the network card in mezzanine slot 3, the blades would boot.  If I then put that same network card in slot 2, and the network card that was in slot 2 in slot 3, (the fibre channel card was in slot 1) the server would still boot, but it would not detect the card in slot 3.  Also, in this configuration, the BIOS does not detect the card in slot 3.  In the original configuration, you could not get into the BIOS before it crashed with the Illegal Opcode error.

The two network cards are different, one is NC364m and the other a NC325m.  It's when the NC364m is in slot 3 that the server crashes.

One other thing to note is that whichever way round I put the network cards, the c7000 enclosure does detect them and provide their information including MAC addresses.

The system board has now been replaced in one of the blades, both blades have been updated with the latest firmware (which they already had) and the BIOS reset, but this has made no difference.

Any ideas what to try next?

Thanks

[Stuart Munday · Accepted solution]

Well, we managed to solve this one.

The enclosure had a combination of BL680c G5 and BL660c G9 blades.  The BL680c supports an OA firmware version from 2.31 to 4.23 and the BL660c supports a version from 4.11 to 4.70.

The OA firmware was upgraded when the BL660c's were added, and the version was 4.60.  This didn't seem to affect the BL680c's until they were powered off and on again.

We downgraded the OA firmare to 4.22 and the BL680c G5's booted successfully.