Hello,
We have recently purchased additional B460 servers for our environment and are running into a bothersome issue. These newly shipped servers are arriving with a higher Board Firmware version than what we currently have in our environment. Although when added to our environment the Firmware auto update runs, it is unable to downgrade the Board Controller firmware on these servers. Our Environment:
Version 2.2(3b)B
Known working board Firmware 4.0
When these newer servers are installed they present major errors to the environment, citing and unsupported Firmware version. In working with Cisco Technical support they informed us that we just needed to upgrade our capability catalog to at least 2.5 to get these servers to be recognized. We installed the latest capability catalog and this does resolve the major errors and allows the B460 (both 5.0 and 6.0) to be fully acknowledged by the system. However, we cannot use the servers after we assign a service profiles to them.
Attempting to assign a service profile results in a soft warning that the firmware version is incompatible with the current CIMC. The assignment of the profile will complete but the machine fails to recognize any local storage. We have tried all Hard Drive slots on both controllers, and the system will show them inventory up until we assign a service Profile.
Cisco Technical support says this can be gotten around by adjusting the Host Firmware Profile to accept the higher board version. However, doing this would cause:
- Lose the Blade package reference of 2.2(3b)B
- Force the reboot of all blades in the environment
- Unknown impact to the service profiles/Blades with the more current boards.
This is not a minimal disruption to a production environment. If I am going to incur this much of an outage, I might as well upgrade the firmware version.
Is this typical for Cisco? I have only been using their equipment for a little over a year and this is a major issue in my mind. I now have two very expensive servers that I cannot provision until I can disrupt all of the others in my environment.
