Slower boot on BL460 G7 than G6 why?

[chuckk281]

Lars-Eric was looking into a customer issue:

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Customer advised that it takes 3 min to start up both G6 and G7 blade.

But when booting OS Win server 2008 it takes 5 min on G6 and 12-15 min on G7. Win server 2003 goes on 5 min on both. Customer wants to know why the same profile takes so long time on G7 blade. Booting from SAN, customer moved to physical disks but still takes the same time. Doesn't seem to matter how much ram and cpu that G7 blades have. Equally slow on all g7 blades.

Why ?

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More info from Lars-Eric:

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The customer did found the problem:

We use this command on all our installations to see what drivers are loaded:

bcdedit /set sos on

This works on all our servers except for bl460c g7, Why is that?. When I remove the switch it boots much faster.

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Any other input or suggestions on this?

[The Brit]

I dont know if this is relevant to Proliant Servers and EFI, however on Itanium EFI there is a shell variable "efiFCScanLevel" which determines whether the whole SAN is scanned (can take a long time depending on extent of fabrics), or just bootable volumes.     The normal value is 0, however under certain conditions, it will change to a value of 1, (full scan).     In most cases, the full scan is a one-time event, however the variable value does not return to 0 on its own, it must be manually reset.

Go to "drvcfg"

on my system, the FC card driver is [26] and the controller is [2A], so

Shell> drvcfg -s 26 2a

Main Menu

 NVRAM Parameters

   1. Edit Adapter Settings

   2. Edit Advanced Settings

   3. Edit Database

   4. Edit Boot Settings

 Information

   5. Show Database

   6. Show Translation

   7. Show NVRAM Buffer

   8. Info

   9. Help

 Operation

  10. Abandon

  11. Write

  12. Quit

Enter a Selection: 4

Edit boot Settings

0. Previous Menu

  1. Help

  2. Enable Alternate Boot Device [n]

  3. Enable Selective Login [n]

  4. Enable Selective Lun Logins [n]

  5. OS Mode [HP-UX/OpenVMS]

  6. EFI Variable EFIFCScanLevel [1]

  7. Enable World Login [n]

(if option 6 = 1 then)

Select option 6

EFI Variable EFIFCScanLevel [1]? 0

Remember to "Write" on your way out.

and repeat for all of your FC HBA ports.