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Massive OA / BIOS /iLO upgrade process or procedure

 
chuckk281
Trusted Contributor

Massive OA / BIOS /iLO upgrade process or procedure

Manuel was looking to help a customer with a server upgrade:

 

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We have a customer who needs to upgrade OA, blades BIOS and iLO in a huge amount of c7000 chasis. Do we have a recommended and tested method for doing so?

 

In this environment they have citrix and a mixture of operating systems, so we think the best way to go is offline upgrading.

 

We have some ideas:

-         Using PXE and a customized SPP ISO for blades, and some script for OA’s

-         Using HP-SIM. The customer does not have it installed, but this will be a good way of getting this software into the customer.

-         Using HPSUM, but I don’t know if it can perform offline upgrades.

 

What do you think?

 

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Input from Stefan:

 

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Both OA and iLO are non-disruptive upgrades. However, you would probably be doing the iLO along with the BIOS.

For the OA, I have used HP SUM in the past for up to 60 OA’s. (The limit is around 100 pr. HP SUM instance) The only downside here is that for each OA you discover in HP SUM, you will get a pop-up box asking if you want to discover the targets within the enclosures.

You will have to manually to click cancel to that, once pr. Enclosure. There is no way around this so far. In addition, use input files with HP SUM, so you will not need to enter in targets manually.

Alternative you could use a combo of plink/putty or the internal BIC tool to do it.

 

As for the blades, if you have Citrix and various other OS’s, in general I agree, offline is the only way to go.

Probably using PXE. As HP-SIM will take some time to set up and HP SIM is using HP SUM, which is probably not supported for some of the OS’s. and it cannot do offline upgrades as you say.

 

However, please keep in mind, that if supported, you should really do both offline firmware and online drivers. If not, you risk problems in the future.

I have more than once seen a server reboot a NIC doing production, because it sees that the NIC is running a newer/older firmware than what the driver expects.

 

I would recommend that you take the time and do them in segments, because there is not one solution that will bring everything up to date in your case.

 

 

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Reply from Jerry:

 

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If the servers are all blades, you could use Enclosure Firmware Managment (EFM) from OA to update the iLO/BIOS. So a script to update the OA and another script to kick off EFM from the OAs.

 

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Any other comments or suggestions? This guide may help: HP ProLiant and Integrity Firmware