Installing ESXi 5.0u1 on HP BL460c Gen8 Blade
Posted on 30 May 2012
The new HP Gen 8 blades are out and I’ve been testing the install of vSphere ESXi 5.0u1 on them. The first thing that stood out is that the vanilla version of ESXi 5 isn’t compatible with the Gen 8 blade. After looking at the BL460c Gen8 quick spec sheet and trying a couple test installs, it became clear that the HP Array controller was the issue. The BL460c Gen8 blade comes with the HP Smart Array P220i controller whereas the G6 and G7 used the P410i.
Apparently the version of the scsi-hpsa driver that ships with ESXi 5.0u1 doesn’t include support for the P220i. Attempting an install with this version yields the following (notice the lack of a hard drive. The LUN listed is actually a 4 GB SD card installed in the blade).
The solution is to use the Image Builder function in vSphere PowerCLI to remove the stock driver and insert the newer OEM driver with support for the P220i controller. You can find lots of information on Image Builder on the web so the intent of this post is not to do a deep dive of image builder. I used this KB post from VMWare as a basic framework for inserting the driver. Here are the steps I used to add the proper P220i driver into the ESXi 5.0u1 install using Image Builder.
- Download the HPSA driver from VMWare. I got it from here but you should probably verify yourself.
- Download the ESXi 5.0u1 Offline bundle.
- Create a location to store the bundles (ex. D:\ImageBuilder\Depot)
- Add the ESXi offline bundle to the software depot { Add-EsxSoftwareDepot – DepotURL D:\ImageBuilder\Depot\update-from-esxi5.0-5.0_update01.zip }
- View the profiles in the bundle { Get-EsxImageProfile }
- Create a custom image profile by cloning one of the original profiles discovered in step 5. { New-EsxImageProfile -CloneProfile “ESXi-5.0.0-20120302001-standard” -name “custom-esxi50u1-g8″ }
- Check what software packages are part of the image profile you just created. { Get-EsxSoftwarePackage } Note the outlined scsi-hpsa is the version that comes as part of the ESXi 5.0u1 and 5.0 installs and doesn’t work on the Gen 8 blade.
- I removed the included version of the scsi-hpsa driver from my custom version so I can add the newer version that supports the P220i. { Remove-EsxSoftwarePackage -ImageProfile “custom-esxi50u1-g8″ -SoftwarePackage “scsi-hpsa” }
- I then added the HPSA OEM driver I downloaded in step 1 to the software depot. { Add-EsxSoftwareDepot -DepotURL hpsa-500.5.0.0-offline_bundle-537239.zip }
- Use Get-EsxSoftwarePackage to list out all packages in the depot. Note: you will see both the included and OEM scsi-hpsa packages listed. Look for the one that lists Hewlett Packard as the vendor. This is the package you want to add to your custom profile.
- Add the OEM scsi-hpsa package to your custom image. You will need to specify both the name and version (show in the screen shot from step 10) in the command or it will just add the version included with ESXi back in and you will be back to square one. { Add-EsxSoftwarePackage -ImageProfile “custom-esxi50u1-g8″ -SoftwarePackage “scsi-hpsa 5.0.0-24OEM.500.0.0.406165″ }
- Create an ISO and/or Bundle from your custom image. I created both so I could verify the correct driver was inserted by starting a new depot and adding that bundle in and using the Get-EsxSoftwarePackage command. To create the ISO or bundle use the { Export-EsxImageProfile custom-esxi50u1-g8 [-ExportToISO | -ExportToBundle] -filepath D:|blah.[iso | zip] }
- Now boot to the ISO and verify you can see a hard disk to install to. If so you are done.
3 responses to Installing ESXi 5.0u1 on HP BL460c Gen8 Blade
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HP has released a new version of HP ESXi 5.0 U1 (June) which is available for download here:
https://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=HPVM09
VMware ESXi 5.0 U1 (June) is fully supported on new Gen8 servers and included updated providers for the new Gen8 servers and new hardware.
Hello Rotem. Thanks for the links. I was aware that HP has a supported version of ESXi with the correct drivers, however the Enterprise I work for does not allow the use of vendor specific ESXi installs which is why we needed to insert just the specific driver required.
Please see the following HP Customer Advisory:
Advisory: VMware ESX/ESXi 4.1 and VMware ESXi 5.x – The Base VMware ESX/ESXi 4.1 and VMware ESXi 5.x Operating System Media From VMware Does Not Include the Required Network and Storage Device Drivers to Complete Installation on HP ProLiant Gen8 Server
http://bizsupport1.austin.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c03329963