During the deployment of a vSAN cluster consisting of multiple HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 hosts, I noticed a memory health warning after updating the firmware using the Support Pack for ProLiant. The error was definitely not shown before the update, so it was clear, that this was not a real issue with the hardware. Furthermore: All hosts showed this error.
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
The same day, a customer called me and asked me about a strange memory health error after he has updated all of his hosts with the latest SPP…
After a reboot, a VMware ESXi 6.7 U3 told me that he has no compatible NICs. Fun fact: Right before the reboot everything was fine.
The ILO also showed no NICs. Unfortunately, I wasn’t onsite to pull the blade server and put it back in. But there is a way to do this “virtually”.
You have to connect to the IP address of the Onboard Administrator via SSH. Then issue the reset server command with the bay of the server you want to reset and an argument.
I’ve got several mails and comments about this topic. It looks like that the latest ESXi 6.7 updates are causing some trouble on HPE ProLiant Gen10 servers.
I’ve blogged about recurring host hardware sensor state alarm messages some weeks ago. A customer noticed them after an update. Last week, I got the first comments under this blog post abot fan failure messages after applying the latest ESXi 6.7 updates. Then more and more customers asked me about this, because they got these messages too in their environment after applying the latest updates.
If you found this blog post because you are searchting for a solution for a FAN FAILURE on your ProLiant Gen10 HW after applying the latest ESXi 6.7 patches, then use this shortcut for the workaround: Fan health sensors report false alarms on HPE Gen10 Servers with ESXi 6.7
I had a really annoying problem at one of my customers. After deploying new VMware ESXi hosts (HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10) along with an upgrade of the vCenter Server Appliance to 6.
Change History 01-13-2018: Added information regarding VMSA-2018-0004 01-13-2018: HPE has pulled Gen8 and Gen9 system ROMs 01-13-2018: VMware has updated KB52345 due to issues with Intel microcode updates 01-18-2018: Updated VMware section 01-24-2018: Updated HPE section 01-28-2018: Updated Windows Client and Server section 02-08-2018: Updated VMware and HPE section 02-20-2018: Updated HPE section 04-17-2018: Updated HPE section
Many blog posts have been written about the two biggest security vulnerabilities discovered so far.
TL;DR: There’s a script at the bottom of the page that fixes the issue.
Some days ago, this HPE customer advisory caught my attention:
Advisory: (Revision) VMware - HPE ProLiant Gen8 Servers running VMware ESXi 5.5 Patch 10, VMware ESXi 6.0 Patch 4, Or VMware ESXi 6.5 May Experience Purple Screen Of Death (PSOD): LINT1 Motherboard Interrupt
And there is also a corrosponding VMware KB article:
ESXi host fails with intermittent NMI PSOD on HP ProLiant Gen8 servers
Some days ago, my colleague Claudia and I started to work on a new project: A greenfield deployment consisting of some well known building blocks: HPE ProLiant, HPE MSA, HPE Networking (now Aruba) and VMware vSphere. Nothing new for us, because we did this a couple times together. But this led us to the idea, to automate some tasks. Especially the configuration of the HPE ProLiants: Changing BIOS settings and configuring the iLO.
In March 2016, HPE CEO Meg Whitman announced a ProLiant-based HCI solution, that should be easier to use and cheaper than Nutanix.
This isn’t HPEs first dance on this floor. In August 2015, HP launched the Hyper Converged 250 System (HC250), which is based on the Apollo server platform. The HW design of the HC250 comes close to a Nutanix Block, because the Apollo platform supports up to four nodes in 2U.
Today, I was at a customer to prepare a two node vSphere cluster for some MS SQL server tests. Nothing fancy, just two HP ProLiant BL460c Gen9 blades and two virtual volumes from a HP 3PAR. Each blade had two 400 GB SSDs, two 64 GB M.2 SSDs and a 1 GB MicroSD card. Usually, I install ESXi to a SD card. In this case, a MicroSD card. The SSDs were dedicated for PernixData FVP.
Sometimes you need to reset the ILO Administrator password. Sure, you can reboot the server, press F8 and then reset the Administrator password. If you have installed a HP customized ESXi image, then there is a much better way to reset the password: HPONCFG.
Check the /opt/hp/tools directory. You will find a binary called hponcfg.
~ # ls -l /opt/hp/tools/ total 5432 -r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 5129574 Oct 28 2014 conrep -r--r--r-- 1 root root 108802 Oct 28 2014 conrep.
