Onboard Administrator (OA) Hardware version mismatch issue

[chuckk281]

Olaf was looking to help a customer:

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A customer bought several c7000 with just one OA installed in each enclosure. Now, a few month later, the customer purchased redundant OAs for all their enclosures. The installed them into the enclosures and ended up with not being able to synchronize the firmware between the 2 OAs, because of different hardware version of the OAs! Whenever the customer hits the button “Synchronize firmware”, the get the error message “The Active and Standby Onboard Administrators are not the same hardware build”! The original OAs are hardware version B1 and the newly added B3.

Can anybody explain a procedure to synchronize the firmware between the 2 OAs, without bringing down the whole enclosure?

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Monty replied:

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As described in the OA User Guide – if you have different OA hardware versions you simply need to update the active OA firmware to the version that you want to synchronize.

In your example below – updating the firmware for OA1 using GUI, CLI or LCD with USB key containing the OA firmware will update both OA to that firmware version.

The OA flash containing the firmware is not large enough to store the entire downloadable OA firmware update image.  If the two OA modules are identical hardware versions, the OA firmware sync feature creates an OA firmware image for the other OA.  With mismatched OA hardware, the active OA does not have the required hardware drivers and other files to create the correct firmware image.  The OA firmware file in the SPP or downloadable from the web supports all the current shipping OA hardware for both c7000 and c3000 enclosures.

Hope that helps,

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Other comments or suggestions?

[zchris]

Olaf,

I had the same issue, to resolve I just went through the usual firmware OA update process.

[CLEB]

I'm having this issue "FWSync: Sync failed because the Active and Standby OAs do not have the same hardware version."

Do I have to update to the latest fw on the Active OA in order to solve this?

Active OA     hw B1 fw 4.01

Standby OA hw A1 fw 3.60

[FabioC1]

HI CLEB, 

This messagem acoours when the hardware of OA, are differents 

EX - One OA have KVM and other doesn't have. KVM

So for update you need use access by SSH and update by pendrive use CLI command

And the firmware of OA is necessary to be in usb, the file is*.bin 

Look the site 

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-a00040672en_us&docLocale=en_US

UPDATE IMAGE using USB key

• Command:

 UPDATE IMAGE {{[FORCE] {<url> | FW_ISO}} | SYNC}

• Description:
  • The UPDATE IMAGE command downloads a new flash image from the network and uses it to update the Onboard Administrator firmware. If a redundant Onboard Administrator is present in the system, then this command flashes and validates its firmware before attempting to flash the active Onboard Administrator.
  • Supported protocols are HTTP, FTP, and TFTP.
  • The URL must be formatted as protocol://host/path/file.
  • The URL syntax for IPv6 addresses is protocol://[<ipv6 address>]/path/file.
  • If FTP server does not support anonymous logins, a user name and password can be specified within the URL formatted as ftp://username:password@host/path/file.
  • Use FORCE to enable downgrading of firmware even if settings and passwords might be lost.
  • The UPDATE IMAGE SYNC command initiates a firmware sync of the active and standby onboard administrators.
  • For USB protocol, use SHOW USBKEY .
• Access level/Bay level: OA administrator, OA operator

• Restrictions:

• User cannot use the FORCE option for downgrade in FIPS mode on/debug/top-secret/top-secret debug.
• The maximum supported file size for USB keys formatted with FAT32 is 4GB. For SPP images greater than 4GB, use an ext2-formatted USB key. For information about formatting a USB key with an ext2 file system, see the BladeSystem Onboard Administrator user guide.

CAUTION: When a firmware upgrade is in process, do not disconnect or shut down the Onboard Administrator modules. Doing so could render the Onboard Administrator or server blade unusable.

NOTE: Updating the OA firmware from an OA version earlier than 3.50 to OA version 4.50 or later requires an intermediate update to OA 3.50 first, unless using the FW_ISO or SYNC arguments with the command. The intermediate OA 3.50 firmware can be downloaded from the onboard administrator website.