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Posts Tagged ‘IBM’

Lenovo/IBM manual update from BOMC medium

September 23rd, 2015 2 comments

Couple days ago I had following problem. I wanted to install the newest firmwares on Lenovo (IBM) x3650 M5 server. I used Bootable Media Creator to create CD with latest firmwares for this machine. Problem came when I looked into firmwares BOMC wanted to upgrade:

BOMC

BOMC

Problem was that I wanted to upgrade firmware for SAS card ServeRAID N2225 which was installed in this server. This card is also supported and there was also new firmware downloaded into BOMC directory:

BOMC

It looked like BOMC didn’t detect card in server and therefore it didn’t put it into the list of firmwares which should be upgraded. I tried other server which was in same configuration and it was same result. Then I tried to press ALT+F1 combination in BOMC. New bash shell came on screen. I tried list directory “ls -al” and I was there are all the files with firmwares. So I have tried to run binary with mentioned firmware:

BOMC

Tadaaaaa….firmware upgraded. It looks like Lenovo has some bugs in its tool BOMC. I hope Lenovo support will get at least close to IBM support.

Have a nice day,

 

Categories: Unassigned Tags: , , , , ,

Problems with CPU in incompatible error during VMWare vMotion

April 23rd, 2013 14 comments

One of our users reported problems with vMotion after firmware upgrade of IBM server. Firmware were upgraded using BOMC (utility to create ISO images to upgrade IBM server to the lastest versions available).

After upgrade user was not able to do vMotion. They received following error:

Host CPU is incompatible with the virtual machine’s requirements at CPUID level 0x1 register ‘ecx’.

CPU is incompatible

After couple minutes of googling I found out following official articles:

Based on information there is change when you do firmware upgrade. Sometime (from some version) AES feature is Enabled and sometime is disabled. This setting cannot be changed in BIOS and this is really sad. So let’s look at the way you can change it.

In second mentioned article IBM suppose to download some prepared ISO image called BoMC-2.20-uEFI-AesEnable-to-enabled-vmotion-fix.iso. But I couldn’t find this ISO image. So I had to use other way around. I downloaded IBM Advanced Setting Utility. I downloaded and installes version for Windows 64b. You need your RSA card to be accessible through network. Then you can run following command to check actual value:

asu64.exe showvalues UEFI.AesEnable –host RSA_IP_ADDRESS –user RSA_USER –password RSA_PASSWORD

AES showvalue

You can check it on all ESX servers. To decide whether feature should be enabled or disabled you this article. We need to change it to the same setting using following command:

asu64.exe set UEFI.AesEnable Disable –host RSA_IP_ADDRESS –user RSA_USER –password RSA_PASSWORD

set AES

When values are the same on all ESX server you are able to do vMotion. I was kinda mad on IBM, because I would preffer to change this value in BIOS instead of some application.

Customized ESXi images by hardware vendors

August 20th, 2012 No comments

When you install ESXi server on brand made servers (IBM, HP, DELL,…) you should use customized ESXi ISO images prepared by vendors:

I hope this will help someone.

 

 

Categories: VMWare Tags: , , , , , , , ,

IBM: Mode select for redundant controller page 2C received

May 1st, 2011 6 comments

Problem:
This event can appear on IBM storages when some host is trying to access unmapped disk. Here is an example of event:

Date/Time: 29.4.2011 10:53:38
Sequence number: 318286
Event type: 300D
Event category: Command
Priority: Informational
Description: Mode select for redundant controller page 2C received
Event specific codes: 0/0/0
Component type: Controller
Component location: Enclosure 85, Slot 1
Logged by: Controller in slot A

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