VERY SLOW boot on ISO mounted virtual Media

[nowakowski]

I want to boot a blade on a WinPE prepared for automatic blade / iLO2 configuration. I made a WinPE ISO, and it start in 30 seconds on a dummy VM. When I use iLO2 or Virtual Media to mount my WinPE ISO, the blade need up to 10 minutes to load WinPE ! I tried to : - put the WinPE ISO on my PC, and on another blade on the same enclosure - I upgraded iLO2 firmware to 1.60 - I can't upgrade HPOA firmare for today. - check netwrok - no network collisions detected. Harware used: c7000 - bl460c - HPOA connected to blade's Cisco 3020 Thanks for any help / suggestion Laurent

[Calvin Staples]

I can't speak to your experience directly but my experience is that the Virtual Media option (JAVA) in the "Web Administration" in the OA is 5 - 10 times faster and much more reliable than using the "Virtual Media" option available when you open the console through the ILO option in the OA. I have tried both methods to run the HP Firmware Maintenance CD and I think the ILO console option should be a last resort, especially when doing firmware updates as it will drop the connection as well as being very SLOW-W-W-W-W!

[ricardo van Eer]

We had the same problem. upgrade the AOM firmware. This solves this problem.

[dclaypool]

The speed of virtual media is dependent on several factors. Keep in mind that 1. The virtual media Java applet or the IRC ActiveX control hosting the ISO is dependent on the speed of your client computer. 2. Your network connection speed. NEVER do this from a client connected wirelessly. 3. There is additional overhead imposed because the information is sent across the wire encrypted in 128-bit SSL. 4. The poor old iLO2 processor has to be on the receiving end of that encryption and has to decrypt it and also 'fool' the host into thinking this is a USB connected drive. 5. Finally, you're still in a pre-boot environment, and the 'legacy USB 1.1 emulation' provided by the BIOS is a lot slower than USB 2.0 speeds experienced once an OS is loaded. There are a number of things you can do to mitigate this: - Host the ISO on an HTTP server and connect to it with the iLO CLI (requires iLO Advanced Key) which bypasses the Java/ActiveX speed issues. - WinPE is a pretty heavyweight environment for a pre-boot environment; you might have better luck with a more compact Linux for your pre-boot needs - Utilize PXE to boot directly over the network

[dagwieers]

On a HP BL460c G6 with iLO2 v2.07 (17/08/2011) and System ROM I24 (14/01/2010) I can tell from the Apache logs that we get at best 2x 120kB per sec (240kB/sec), but in most cases we don't get more than 4x 16kB per sec (64kB/sec). For a typical 34MB RHEL6 boot image it means between 3 and 8 minutes boot-time.

From the same logs we also see there is some variety in block sizes (chuncks) that are requested from the Apache server using a HTTP range header. It is unclear to what is causing the irregular block sizes.

The ISO images are provided from the same network as the iLO2 directly through HTTP. So we don't use the java Virtual Media applet.

The blade's iLO link speed is set to Automatic, when forced to 100Mbps FD, it automatically jumps back to Automatic. (Even though 100Mbps FD is marked in bold, which seems to indicate that it is the recommended settings). If Automatic means Auto-negotiated, this may be the cause of the low speed and irregular block sizes (as auto-negotiate could mean 100Mbps HD), however we were told that the iLO link is internal to the enclosure and cannot be configured from the Enclosure itself, leaving out any possibility to influence the link speed configuration.

Feedback welcome.

[dagwieers]

Ok, after updating using the latest firmware DVD (v10.10), the speed increased to 12x 64kB per sec (768kB/sec) which makes a very big improvement in boot speed (in this particular case x12). This is close to the USBv1 limit so I don't think we can expect a large improvement over this speed.

iLO2 firmware was updated as part of the firmware DVD, now at v2.09 (11/04/2012), and the System ROM was updated to I24 (05/05/2011). Yes, this one is also called I24 ?!?