More on DL180 G5 Host Updates

After using a CentOS LiveCD to update an HP DL180 G5 E200 storage controller’s firmware, without being able to recognize the 3TB SAS drives (625031-B21) connected to it, I went back to the well and updated the BIOS to 2010.10.25 (8 Dec 2010) using the same method.  I just re-used the USB stick and added the new update in a new directory.  But no joy on recognizing the drives.  This step was a bit scary as the DL185 G5 has a known issue with needing to go to an intermediate BIOS level.   Skipping that will brick the system.  But nothing like that is anywhere in the BIOS version history for the DL180 G5.  It didn’t get bricked.

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Firmware Updates on vSphere Hosts

Recently, HP and Dell have both come out with their latest generation hardware platforms (HP’s Gen8 platform and Dell’s 12th generation platform).  Along with those platforms come updates to embedded management features (HP’s iLO and Dell’s iDRAC 7).

Great stuff.  But sometimes in the real world, we’re faced with hardware that wasn’t manufactured this year.  How does one manage those platforms in a virtualized environment?

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