ESXi7 - Need to Downgrade 3820 CNA firmware

[Poyatier]

Greetings--  Have Synergy environment with SY480 Blades and older CNAs (3820c's).  The blades are running VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0U3 and have the HPE AddOne (sut/ams/ilo) all installed.  I have a need to temporarily downgrade the firmware on the CNAs.  I have the offline bundle (CP047347.ZIP).  With the host in maintmode, I extracted to a /tmp directory and ran:

/tmp/esxcli software component apply -d /tmp/CP047347_VMw.ZIP

It completed & installed successfully; however, even after a host reboot, the firmware did not downgrade.  I see nothing in iLO to suggest it even tried to downgrade.

Any thoughts/ideas?

Thanks,

[thutchings]

Hello,

If you are trying to backrev the 3820c firmware you will likely need to specify some additional options to make it flash to an older version. You would need, at least, the '-g' parameter to be used to select to downgrade. I do not foresee it being needed, but you can specify the force option using '-f'.

Note: If you are downgrading the NIC firmware you should also performing the same with the NIC driver so that they match.

Regards

[Poyatier]

@thutchings 

Thank you for the reply.  Question-- what would that syntax look like?  esxcli doesnt provide info on the -f or -g switches.

If I try and use either/or -f  or -g  it errors with invalid option.

esxcli software component apply -d /tmp/CP047347_VMw.zip -f -g

esxcli software component apply -f -g -d /tmp/CP047347_VMw.zip

Neither of those work.

[thutchings · Accepted solution]

Hello,

The command "esxcli software component apply –d /tmp/CPxxxxxx_VMware.zip" only puts them into the correct directory for them to be run.

I did not have a system with a 3820c to test against, but I tested this out with a SY480 Gen10 w/ a 4820c running ESXi 7.0. In my case, I executed the following which resulted in the FW being downgraded:

/opt/Smart_Component/CP049785] ./Execute_Component -g

You should see at the end a return code of 1 (1 means a reset is required to apply).

Regards

[Poyatier]

Thanks for the assist.  For some reason it totally slipped my mind to execute the install after deploying the component.  After executing with -f -g -s, it allowed for the silent forced downgrade of the firmware w/o any issues.

[Sunitha_Mod]

Hello @Poyatier, 

That's awesome! 

We are extremely glad to know the problem has been resolved.