PSP / BIOS Update for W2003 SP1

[Eric_388]

What are you all doing before a W2003 SP1 update?

HP recommends a Proliant Support Pack and System BIOS update if necessary when upgrading to W2003 SP1. Otherwise your hardware is not supported.

Is everyone doing this or not (and why)?
Can I expect issues on devices or W2003 when I upgrade the System BIOS on several types of Proliant ML/DL servers?

Please help and thanks in advance.

Eric.

[Steven Clementi]

Eric:

It's usually best to follow up a Service Pack with a newer PSP as the Service Pack may change stuff that is then fixed by the PSP.

I just ran though about 50 servers upgrading to Win2k3SP1 and did not do the PSP (7.3 at the time). Servers were mostly running 6.4 or 7.0. We had issues with the general operation of those servers until we updated them with PSP 7.30.


My suggestion is to test out 1 non critical machine with SP1, then install the PSP if necessary (if you have not done a PSP in a long while). There have been some issues where SP1 overwrote the array controller driver causing boot issues. If you need the PSP, I suggest you run the Service Pack with the switch to NOT allow it to reboot automatically, then when the SP finishes, run the PSP and reboot.


Steven

[Eric_388]

Steven, thanks.

which array controller(s) are you refering to? Are there known problems with arraycontrollers?

Eric.

[Steven Clementi]

All DL380 G3's and G4's with 5i/6i cotrollers.

I don't think there are "known issues" except that we had drivers over a year old installed. PSP 6.x when we went to SP1. SHould probably have been at at least 7.0 or better beforehand.


Steven

[Paul Slater_4 · Accepted solution]

Steps I took applied to DL380 G2, G3, G4 and DL360 G4.

Updated bios to newest version. (Gl380G4 issues), uninstall 6.3/6.4 agents, rebooted.
Installed 7.3 agents (highest available at time), reboot.
Installed sp1 w/o rebooting, then re-ran PSP 7.3, rebooted.
Verified System eventlog.


We tried updating 6.4 to 7.3 agents w/o a reboot in between, but sometimes it would hang on the install (over an hour). Plus Survey did not uninstall on a few.
Also tried sp1 reboot then 7.3 again, w/o issues.

I recommend updating the bios for system and array controller. We had a blue screen after SP1 in the testlab.

[Eric_388]

Paul, thanks.

This is getting out of hand! First we only would install SP1 on our machines. After some research we found that HP recommends PSP 7.3 or later otherwise your machine is not supported. After that we found out that there may be issues with the BIOS. Now Paul says you should also upgrade BIOS Options (array controller). When will this stop?
I think, for us, it's going to be like this:
- SP1 and PSP 7.4
- reboot
- fix System/Options BIOS if necessary.

Anyone else?