Virtually Jason

Several of my customers use HP C7000 Blade Chassis for their ESXi hosts.  I've picked up a few tips and tricks for working with that chassis over the years, so I figured that I'd post them here. The Virtual Connect (the blade chassis's networking component) has a feature that can prevent pause frames from flooding a network by disconnecting a blade that is sending an excessive number of them.  Unfortunately, every now and then, it detects an ESXi host's uplink as sending such a number of pause frames and so disconnects that network adapter.  Fortunately, it's really easy to allow traffic to flow through that port once again.  Just SSH into the Virtual Connect (you can get the address by looking at the "Virtual Connect Manager" link in the Onboard Administrator interface.  Once you're connected, use the show port-protect  command to see if there are any ports that are in a blocking state.  If so, you can use the reset port-protect  command to res...

Several of my customers use HP C7000 blade chassis for their ESXi hosts.  One of them asked me to help them update the firmware in their enclosures.  There are basically three different pieces of the blade chassis; each one needs updating.  The blades themselves need updating, the Interconnect Modules (basically, embedded switches) need updating and the Onboard Administrator Modules need updating.  There are different and varied steps for updating each of those components.  The blade is updated by bootstrapping with an SPP (Service Pack for Proliant) ISO.  The OA is updated through its own web interface by uploading a specific .bin file.  The Virtual Connect (which is the centralized management for all of the Interconnect Modules) is updated through its own special command line utility by uploading its own specialized .bin file. All of that is a little awkward, but it’s not really that big of a deal.  We did run into one spot of difficulty, as ...