Relevancy between firmware with drivers with OS

[Dwayne Skinner]

We are starting to use SIM for deploying firmware/drivers/software and one of the engineers posed a concern. Some firmware really needs to have a certain driver installed in order to run properly. Some of the drivers need to have a certain OS component at a certain revision. We want to ensure that we don't install firmware when some of the other relevancies may not have been met.

When I installed support paq 8.15b on a server using the download (not SIM) one of the components failed to install due to a storport driver being out of date. It appears that the support paq verifies OS relevancy during the isntall. Is this how you prove relevancy? If so, is there a way to verify prior to a failure? If this method is used we would have to run the install, see what fails, update that windows component, then rerun the install of that driver. I would like to verify that all the proper OS components are there prior to doing the install.

When I went to create my custom baseline I selected 8.15B as my support paq then I went down to the firmware section. I noticed that checkmarks were on certain firmware. It looks like firmware was chosen based on the support paq I chose. Can I assume the firmware is relevant to the drivers or is it choosing these firmware components for a different reason?

Any links to documentation/information would be greatly appreciated.

[Timothy Cusson]

HP has a website with listings of the various hardware/software/firmware dependencies. It is called SPOCK (Single Point Of Connectivity Knowledge). Just go to hp.com and search for SPOCK.

As for deployment, there are very few drivers have a dependency on firmware level. Normally you can update the drivers without updating the firmware. I usually update all the firmware first then drivers second. The ProLiant System ROM (BIOS), RAID controllers and iLO are straight forward but don't take effect until a reboot.

You have to be careful with the NIC and fibre HBA firmware and driver updates. It may be better to create a custom baseline just for the NIC and another just for the fibre card.

The NIC fimware and driver updates causes the NIC to go offline then come back online. You should manually verify these updates were successful before proceeding, this is sometimes problematic because you may loose network connectivity. This is when it's great to have an iLO.

The fibre HBA firmware can be upgraded online, but the upgrade does cause the link to drop and come back online. This is not a problem for dual redundant fabrics. As you mentioned, the Windows 2003 StorPort driver requires a Microsoft Hot Fix. Also, sometimes you must manually uninstall the old Microsoft fibre card driver, then install the HP / Qlogic or / Emulex driver.

In a large site with many like servers, the ideal method would be to do a test run on one server using four custom baselines, one for the firmware, one for NIC, one for fibre HBA and finaly one for the psp.

[MC Murphy]

I hit this issue just a week ago. I updated the NIC driver on an ML350. On the spot I could not copy files on/off the server, could not get any SQL queries through to the server. HP Support walked me through updating the firmware. That fixed the problem just as suddenly. I went looking for SPOCK as recommended, I could not find a link to a site, I did find a forum thread saying only an HP employee or an HP Partner employee could get access to SPOCK. Is this accurate? I'm watching my driver updates more carefully now.

[Dwayne Skinner]

I found this link which takes you to the web page. I don't know if you need a special login or not since I haven't had a chance to look throught the website yet.

http://h20272.www2.hp.com/

[Timothy Cusson]

Sorry about that, the following is the URL to SPOCK...

www.hp.com/storage/spock

Welcome to SPOCK

Welcome to the Single Point of Connectivity Knowledge (SPOCK) website. SPOCK is the primary portal used to obtain detailed information about supported HP StorageWorks product configurations. An HP Passport account is required to enter the SPOCK website.
Log in or register for an account

All you have to do is sign up for a free account, your ITRC account may work?

Regarding driver and firmware version control, you can install the free "Version Control Repository". It is included on the HP SmartStart CD. You must have the ProLiant Insight Agents installed and the SMH (System Mgmt Homepage) working. After installing the repository, go to the SMH, on the left select the VC Repository Manager link. Use this to setup auto download schedules. Next web into other ProLiant servers SMH, select VC (Version Control) icon, on left configure settings to "point" to the repository server, and to set a baseline.

You can update the complete PSP, or you can select individual drivers or firmware to update. (small round icon).

Regards,
TC

[Dwayne Skinner]

That exactly what we are going to do. I've got the repository installed and I'm working on a custom baseline. What I'm seeing is some firmware that gets auto-chosen when I select a support paq. Are these the firmware that go along with those particular drivers in the support paq? Do I assume HP has setup SIM so that it selects the firmware that correlates to those drivers?

[Rob Buxton]

Firmware is not usually in the support packs, it's downloaded separately.
There's not usually a relationship between the FW and the PSP, but it does pay to keep things up to date.
There's an issue with s Storport driver that needs a MS hotfix to be applied as a pre-requisite. Can't recall the exact number but I though the error message indicated which one it was.
That's the first time I've seen that impact on the contents of a PSP.