Upgrading Firmware on ESXi

A bane of any system administrator’s existence is the constant stream of firmware updates to fix various bugs and issues that occur. One of these HBA Firmware updates is a fairly common issue where a new LUN or Target is not being discovered without a reboot. With Emulex there is a set of tools called the HBAanywhere that can be installed onto ESX Classic. Then you can perform an Emulex HBA Firmware upgrade without having to reboot the ESX Host.

Example script:

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cd /usr/sbin/hbanywhere
./hbacmd listhbas
./hbacmd download 00:00:01:02:03:04:05 zd282a4.all
./hbacmd hbaattributes 00:00:01:02:03:04:05

With this you have just updated the firmware to 2.82a4 on an LPe11000-M4 card.

With ESXi it isn’t that easy since hbacmd isn’t available. The solution I came up with is to create a bootable WinPE CD with the Emulex Tools and firmware available on it. Then all you have to do is boot off this CD and you will be able to update your 10G CNA or your Emulex LPe12000 HBAs.

This script expects you to have the Windows AIK installed locally. Just update this script to point at the appropriate locations of the listed files.

CustomEmulexWinPE.cmd – Run this to create a bootable ISO that will install the Emulex WinPE utilities & drivers and then attempt to upgrade the 10G CNA & LPe12000 cards in the system.

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call "C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\pesetenv.cmd"
 
call copype x86 EmulexWinPE
 
imagex /mountrw Winpe.wim 1 mount
 
mkdir mount\Emulex
xcopy "setupElxAll-x86.exe" mount\Emulex\
xcopy /s "Firmware" mount\Emulex\
del mount\Windows\System32\startnet.cmd
xcopy "startnet.cmd" mount\Windows\System32\startnet.cmd
 
peimg /prep mount\Windows
imagex /unmount mount /commit
copy winpe.wim ISO\sources\boot.wim
 
oscdimg -n -betfsboot.com ISO EmulexWinPE.iso

startnet.cmd – This runs on boot and will attempt to update the 10G CNA & the Emulex LPe12000 cards in the system.

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wpeinit
 
\Emulex\setupElxAll-x86.exe /q
cd "\Program Files\Emulex\Util\elxApp"
 
winlpcfg download a=lpe12000-m8 i=\emulex\lpe12000\ud111a5.all
winlpcfg download a=lpe12000-m8 i=\emulex\lpe12000\ub202a2.prg
 
winlpcfg download n=1 i=\emulex\oce10102\s1462001.ufi
winlpcfg download n=2 i=\emulex\oce10102\s1462001.ufi
winlpcfg download n=3 i=\emulex\oce10102\s1462001.ufi
winlpcfg download n=4 i=\emulex\oce10102\s1462001.ufi
 
winlpcfg listhba

Once this script is done running you’ll have a EmulexWinPE.iso that you can mount and boot off of. It will automatically run and upgrade the firmware of the Emulex devices.

This basic setup should allow you to do anything scripting wise you need to do in a Windows environment to update the hardware configuration or run various diagnostics tests outside of ESXi.

Download Locations:
setupElxAll-x86.exe
Windows AIK
Emulex Firmware – Download as needed and update the location you copy it to your WinPE ISO file in the Startnet.cmd and in the CustomEmulexWinPE.cmd.

Posted on June 17, 2010 at 1:15 pm by iguy · Permalink
In: VMware · Tagged with: , , ,

3 Responses

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  1. Written by PiroNet
    on 23 June 2010 at 1:50 pm
    Permalink

    Nice trick!

    Eventually if you have HP servers, you could boot up from the HP Firmware CD and upgrade the HBAs but also any other firmware on that server…

  2. Written by Peter Van Geem
    on 5 August 2010 at 8:45 am
    Permalink

    You could still use HBAnywhere on ESXi, as the Emulex CIM providers are included in ESXi & the HBAnywhere client contains the CIM components to talk to ESXi …

  3. Written by iguy
    on 12 August 2010 at 8:50 pm
    Permalink

    This didn’t work initially. I will do this test again and see if it works going forward. The issue is now I need a secondary system to apply the updates from when doing a build. That complicates automation quite a bit.

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