11-01-2012 10:43 PM - edited 03-01-2019 10:42 AM
Hello everyone,
I ran into an interesting issue this evening. While upgrading our B200 blade from 2.0(1t) to 2.0(3c) our servers did not boot into the Cisco firmware utility. The system showdown the OS, rebooted and began the OS load, then during mid-load powered off the OS and began loading the firmware utility. While no damage was done this time around I have 6 additional server blades that need this firmware. Is there a workaround for this? I suspect it may be due to the boot policy set to local disk. A quick search didn't return any results. Has anyone else seen this issue?
Thank is advance.
11-02-2012 01:05 AM
Hi Kendall,
There are a few things I am not sure about and would like to get details on:
1) You saw this behaviour during the BIOS upgrade or any other firmware / end point upgrade?
2) I am not very clear about what you mean by the firmware utility? The upgrades for the firmware in B series happen in the background and as such we do not load any utility (but i'll like to hear more from you).
Note: The BIOS update on the blades do need it to go through a reboot, however you can defer this using a maintenance polocy.
./Abhinav
11-02-2012 07:06 AM
This occured after applying the new firmware policy to the server/host. Our Maintenance policy is set to User ACK so after acknowledging the activity the server began the firmware upgrade. I saw the same behavior on an ESX host and a windows host so I don't believe it is an host OS issue. Additionally, The frimware policy was applied to the ESX host first while it was in maintenance mode. The Windows server was shutdown when the policy was applied.
In the case of the ESX host, the server shutdown and began rebooting into ESX. While loading the vmware kernal the system performed a hard shutdown, rebooted, and then began the firmware upgrade. After the firmware upgrade finished the server rebooted again and came up into the ESX environment. After witnessing the odd boot pattern on the ESX host, my hope was that the Windows server would go through the firmware upgrade without booting into the Windows OS and being interrupted. Just to clarify, when I say the OS was interrupted I mean the server was almost completely up. The Windows logon screen displayed very briefly and then the UCS appeared to have "cut the power" to the blade and bagan the frimware update.
11-04-2012 04:43 PM
What I had seen and this would need to be confirmed in your lab is that the host firmware policy is pushing mutliple firmware/bios changes that each require a reboot. The change needs to update then actived. The BIOS update will take some time to update while the adapter may be quicker. Once the adapter has completed the update, the blade is rebooted. When the BIOS is ready to be updated, the blade reboots again.
If true, there may be an enhancement opportunity here.
Thank You,
Dan Laden
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