If you have been following this series of posts for a while. You’ll know I have an issue with my new HP ML350e Gen8 servers. I’m using a generic Intel Gigabit card, when the card is enabled the fan runs at 30-40%, when disabled it runs at 6%. The difference in noise is palpable, and plus there’s a certain “revving” noise which is particularly irritating. In the end I range HP support about this issue – and they politely explained that as the NICs were not genuine HP parts, then the liability was mine. That goes to show two things – firstly checking the VMware HCL isn’t really enough, and if you here people talk about “commodity hardware” that’s a bit of myth when your dealing with large OEM provider – that’s not a dig at HP by the way, you could apply this to any enterprize provider. It’s just the way our industry is – right or wrong.
Anyway, in the end I decided I would try a firmware update across the various components. I’m not convinced this will make ANY difference, as I think this is chipset issue issue associated with thermal detection of the device itself. But I think its good practise to keep this stuff update since servers generally ship with Jurassic versions anyway…
ILO Download:
ILO4 Update to 1.32; (Released: Nov, 2013)
Instructions:
Downloads as cp021805.exe. You need Windows to extract it (sorry to Mac users like me). From the ILO itself – +Administrator +Firmware +Click Choose File, and Browse for the .bin file.
HP Intelligent Provisioning Download:
Update to 1.50 (Released: 10 Sep 2013)
Instructions:
Download .ISO image. Create remote console session via ILO, and boot to the DVD… Allow the automate system to flash the environment
HP ESXi Offline Bundle for VMware vSphere 5.5 Download:
Despite the fact you download a HP.iso from vmware.com, updates do exists onto of that GA’d release. This takes the format of .ZIP file that you can download from HP’s website.
You may or not need this bundle. The HP .iso on vmware.com has the date 2013.09.26, and this bundle was released at the same time. So this is there for people who used a generic version of ESXi (good luck with that!) or have done upgrades via VUM, and want to distribute this offline bundle via other methods.
Update 1.5 (Released: 26 Sep 2013)
Instructions:
Use esxcli, VMware Update Manager or PowerCLI to install the update. Personally, I like to upload bundles like this to shared storage, and then invoke the esxcli command like this:
esxcli software vib install -d /vmfs/volumes/hp-esxi5.5uX-bundle-1.5-27.zip
Conclusion:
Did these updates fix my NIC card issue? Nope… 🙁
I thought I would take a look at the system BIOS to see if the ID of the card had changed. It handn’t. I was also given a type about disabling the thermostatic controls for the PCI buses from the BIOS. I’d tried this before to no available. But perhaps the firmware update had taken affect.
Sadly, not the device is still reported as an “Unknown PCI Device”. Disabling of the power management on the PCI bus held on >>Power Management Options >>Advanced Power Management Options >>PCI-E Gen3 Control
Some folks have talked of running some sort update to the NIC cards – but I haven’t a clue how to go about to doing that. Plus I run the risk of bricking perfectly functional NICs which might have some resale value on ebay – and may well help finance a card purchase that is compatible.
What I’m going to do is work with cards as is for part of my work on Distributed vSwitches. Once that’s done, I will remove the physical NICs and ebay them (with warnings for folks running VMware ESX 5.5 on the HP Series of servers). Then I might consider replacing them with proper HP parts – or else I might just run on 2xNIC setup rather than the 4xNIC setup that I’m used to…