Required System ROM upgrade on Proliant Servers

[Matt Hitchcock]

In November HP published
customer advisory EL040709_CW01 revision 1
(http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=PSD_EL040709_CW01) issuing an upgrade BIOS for Proliant servers with a timing marginality in the intel processor. According to the articles it is possible for a blue screen to happen because of this fault unless the BIOS is upgraded.

My company is currently preparing to update the BIOS on our servers to fix this, but we have over 600 servers at the moment and more on the way. To help us plan a strategy for updates as this will obviously take time, can anyone shed any light on the risk presented by running the old BIOS on a production server. Is there a timescale to an inevitable blue screen? Is the risk increased or decreased based on a servers workload? Is there no way to tell when this may happen?

Any information that anyone can provide would be helpful.

Thanks

[David Claypool]

The best way to accomplish this task is by using HP Systems Insight Manager and its version control feature. It can do unattended upgrades, scheduled in the middle of the night if you want, and it's free. Additionally, there is little risk of doing an online BIOS update because for several years ProLiants have come with redundant ROMs. If a system fails during the upgrade process, the server will still be able to boot using the previous ROM.

More info: http://www.hp.com/go/hpsim