conrep does not really switch BIOS settings

[Erwin Jussli]

Hi community,

we use conrep v3.30 to enable the BIOS settings necessary for Hyper-V usage

on Proliant DL380p Gen8, that are:

No_Execute_Memory_Protection -> enabled

CPU_Virtualization -> enabled

Intel_VT-d2 -> enabled

Reading the values with conrep subsequently shows success.

However Hyper-V is not working after reboot.

Entering BIOS manually, disabling the values mentioned above, enabling them again - all manually -

results in Hyper-V working after the boot process has been completed !

Does anyone have a hint how to avoid this huge amount of manual work on dozens of servers ?

Thanks and best regards,
Erwin

[Suman_1978]

Hi,

There could be two suspects here, one is the BIOS version and the other the version of CONREP.

Check the BIOS version in your server and see if there is any update available with HP that fixes this issue.

Also take a look at this article.

Thank You!
I am a HP employee.

[Jimmy Vance]

conrep v3.30 should work just fine on a Gen8. What is the contents of the data file your using with conrep?

I'm also pretty sure the default values of those 3 settings is enabled? Are these new systems, or something being re-purposed?

[ernst limbrunner]

hi

for gen8 proliants you should use HPRCU.exe (HP rom configuration utility) which is included in the scripting toolkit.

best regards

ernesto

[Kanjii]

Related to this question, I have a customer who ran "hprcu" when they were running BIOS version P 74 on an SL-230 Gen 8 but noticed that some settings went away when they updated BIOS to P 75 (09/2013, I believe).

I recommended that they re-run hprcu -s again when updating BIOS on a "golden" node and then push the settings out again across their HPC cluster to ensure all nodes were set exactly the same.

Is there a better way to use this tool to audit *.xml file changes when upgrading BIOS revisions?