ESXi 4.1 Bundle 1.0a causes coredump on DL 180 G6

[Martin Kasztantowicz]

After successfully installing the HP Bundle V.1.0a for ESXi 4.1 and rebooting, the system starts up normally but throws a purple cordeump screen. The crash occurs at function "smbios_get_64bit_cpu_info".

This behaviour is completely repeatable: recovering ESXi without any addons works rock stable, reinstalling causes a crash shortly after startup.

The server has a P410 RAID controller and no addon-cards whatsoever. Firmware is all up to date.

Is this a known issue on the DL180 G6 and will this be fixed? This would be quite important for us because without this bundle there is no way of live monitoring the RAID status.

[Ali]

Hi Martin,

Hi this could be issue with settings in system bios or some issues with bios

make sure you have latest system bios and virtualisation option is enabled...

memory configuration also sometime caused this.. make sure you have evenly distributed memory across processor.

download and run HP NMI Sourcing Driver for VMware ESX/ESXi 4.1

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=3884339&prodNameId=3884340&swEnvOID=4091&swLang=13&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=MTX-c2dd60fc9642432dae086527f4

thanks
aftab

[luka_o]

I have exactly the same problem. I tried to install 4.0u2, because i thought its problem with 4.1, but same purple coredump.

Is it maybe problem with server? Any suggestions? Its really annoying not to know RAID status.

Best regards,

[luka_o]

Here is the solution, its the problem that DL series dont have full iLO support, and that hangs ESXi.

- http://forum.lettronics.com/forums/thread/1273.aspx
- http://www.techhead.co.uk/vmware-esxi-purple-screen-of-death-on-hp-proliant-ml110-or-ml115

Another 2 nights of sleep for 5 minute of work solution... :)

best regards,

[Martin Kasztantowicz]

luka,

thank you for these links. However, I would rather call this a workaround at best, not a solution.

As I understand it, removing all this stuff mentioned in the Lettronics article might give me the ability to monitor the RAID health but at the expense of losing the ability to see anything else (fans, power supply, voltages,...) Right?

Besides that I would feel very uncomfortable applying an undocumented and unsupported workaround to a mission critical platform that will most likely break again with the next VMware upgrade, so this is not an option for us.

A solution from HP that is supported and simply works on the DL 180 G6 would be much better considering that it shouldn't be hard to do. I mean, checking for presence of certain ILO functions isn' exactly rocket science, is it?

[luka_o]

No you are wrong. You still get all temps, and fans and everything, you just loose other iLO mesurment, but since we have (cheap) HP server who doesnt have it, it doesnt matter.

I think its great solution, belive me, i checked everywhere on the net, and you doubt that HP will repair this, because they state HP DL180 G6 isnt officially supported. (i dont have that table link right now).

Anyway, its simple 3 min solution, you dont break anything vital in system, so I`ll stick with it, since i dont have extra 1000â ¬ for better servers ;)

best,

[_NeoSys_]

On my side, I installed a regular ESXi v4.1 on Proliant DL180 G6 without errors...

HP ProLiant DL180 G6 / DL160se G6 System ROM - O20 - 2011.05.05 (20 May 2011)

[_NeoSys_]

Confirmed VMware-Installer-HP-USB-SD-Image-4.1-583772-009.iso causes CoreDump on DL 180 G6.