nc382i, stall during initial iscsi boot. DL360/380 G6

[Henning Søilen]

I am looking into booting a couple of dl360/380 g6 servers off an iscsi san. I am in the initial phase where the iscsi target is in an unprepared raw vhd format, getting ready to install an OS. Problem shows up after the Broadcom initiator successfully logs on to the target passing the boot sequence on to the next available boot device. Boot sequence stalls when trying to boot either a dvd rom or usb stick with appropriate os install media.


Regards
Henning

[Henning Søilen]

I will try to shed some more light on this myself.

When selecting "boot iscsi target" to enabled all works well with a LUN prepared with a bootable OS. A bootable OS is of course not in place the first time you are preparing your LUN/installing your OS, hence setting "boot iscsi target" to disabled is the only viable choice. The attached image in my prior message shows what happens then.

If you make the mistake of enabling boot to iscsi target during the install phase you will see the following:

The broadcom initiator sucessfully connects to the target but when finding a non bootable disk it effectivly DISCONNECTS FROM THE TARGET. The result is of course that no matter what broadcom drivers you load or in what sequence you load them you will NEVER SEE any disks avaiable for OS install.

My best bet is that there is a bug in the HP BIOS. DELL's implementation of this works as expected.

Henning

[Henning Søilen]

btw,

started a case # 4613668205 with HP on April 26th about this issue. Wonder how much more time will pass before someone at HP will take this seriously.

Henning

[Vidar Haugen]

whats the FW versions of the servers and the iscsi initiator?
if firmware is not compatible, this will not work. (no matter who made it.)

[Henning Søilen]

Both server are upgraded with the latest broadcom firmware: 2.1.5.7 dated 8. Feb 2010 from HP's web. They also have the latest BIOS dated march 30th.

Henning