iLO Disconnects when booting off of Virtual Media CD-Rom image

[Rende Luitjes]

We have been plagued with numerous drive disconnects when attempting to boot .iso CD-Rom images over iLO Virtual Media sessions to BL20p G3 Blade systems.

We have seen this in the past even with regular Windows install CD images, freshly taken from MSDN.

We have also tried VMware ESX iso's, system rescue CD iso's etc. etc.

The behaviour is always the same, the virtual drive seems to automatically disconnect at random places in the installation procedure.

I have upgraded some of our Blade systems to iLO184 recently and this seems to have improved the successrate somewhat, but we occasionally see drops still.

Just to anticipate on some network related questions to come, the machine running IE6 from is on the same subnet as the target machines' iLO port.

IE version is 6.0.3790.0.
Java plugin is Java(TM) Plug-in 1.4.1_04.

Kind regards,

Rende Luitjes
The Netherlands

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Rende,

I'd either suspect the ilo or the actual cd drive is the problem.

Hardware should be able to diagnose or replace the ilo card. I don't know who is responsible for the cd/dvd.

SEP

[Rende Luitjes]

The CD-Rom drive cannot be an issue, as we're presenting the Virtual Media cd-rom by means of a .iso image. We have tried several .iso images, even freshly downloaded ones.

As to a possibly faulty iLO board, we have seen this with at least 2 of our Blade systems and my guess is that it has more to do with the iLO firmware...

It almost seems to me that certain bit sequences in the .iso images seem to disconnect the Virtual Media. I do realize this seems sound very far fetched.

[Burgener]

This is a known issue when using shared ILO ports.  Anytime the OS causes the network port to reset will cause your virtual media to disconnect as well.  This typically happens when doing an OS installation when going through the network setup.  The work around is to use a dedicated ILO port (at least during installation) OR you can do the OS installation and use the other network port during setup (ie. use eth1 instead of eth0).

IMHO this is a very frustrating behavior and you would think that HPE could design the internal switch ports for ILO to not do this but that might cause other problems (like having the link reset forcing DHCP to run again)

[Oscar A. Perez]

There is no network Switch. The Shared Network Port is a side-band connection provided by the server's NIC that uses the NC-SI protocol (Network Controller Sideband Interface). 

In a nutshell, when you select the iLO Shared Network port option, the iLO's network connection is at the mercy of the server's NIC.  If the NIC is reset by the OS driver, iLO will be unreachable from the network until the server's NIC is back from reboot and allows the side-band traffic to flow.