Blade Enclosure Maintenance

[ww580262]

First off I'd like to say that I'm new to the forums. I've been look through it and I'm excited to be a member. Also I’m new to the Enclosure world. I would like to explain a task I've been assigned and solicit any advice you would\could provide. I’m charged with updating all of the firmware for each of the enclosures including the blades firmware. The OS’s vary from Windows server 2003 32 and 64 bits SP2, Windows 2008 R1 and R2 64bits, ESX server 4.0, and a couple of Oracle servers. We have 13 c7000 series blade enclosures. Three of them have virtual connect devices. All enclosures are pretty much full. The blades installed are BL465c G1’s, G5’s, BL460 G6, BL685c G1’s and G5’s. What would be the best way to approach this task? There would be scheduled down time as these are all production servers. The firmware levels are all out of whack. We have blades with ILO firmware 1.82, 1.81, 1.77, 1.78, 1.70, 1.50, all in one enclosure. Most have different ROM versions as well from A13 02/26/2007, A13/12/2009, A08 07/20/2009 just to name a few. I just found and printed a manual for maintaining c7000 series enclosures that I’m looking over. From experience what issues have you ran into when performing these updates? What should I look out for, and or is there any particular order of installations? ILO updates first, or OA (currently at 2.41 Feb 24 2009) first. Is there a way to mass push the updates to all of the blades in the enclosure? I think I read somewhere were the enclosure could boot from a flash key. I see a USB port on the back of the OA. Please excuse my lack of knowledge\understanding. Like I said earlier this is all fairly new to me. Please let me know of any additional information required\needed.

Thanks in advance
Patric Edwards

[Johan Guldmyr · Accepted solution]

Hey and welcome to the forum Patric!

1. The BIOS revisions is the date after the A13 or A08 etc.
2. BIOS, iLO, OA - that is the order to do the upgrade.
3. VC upgrades used to be something you want to be cautious of and they took quite a long time to do (I recall something like 30 minutes, maybe this have changed though). I would suggest searching this forum for other posts. You may need to do these in steps as well.
4. http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/blades/components/c-class.html has good information. Like compatibility.
5. http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/HP-BladeSystem/Blade-C7000-firmware-upgrade/m-p/4353489#M5078

But the new smartstart DVD has the firmware deployment tool inside it. So from there you can push the upgrades.

[ww580262]

Thank you Johan G this is very helpful and very much appreciated.