Comments on: Upgrading Firmware on ESXi

By: Eddie Green

Eddie Green — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 22:14:54 +0000

What I want to know…is how did you get this to work with the AIK. I have dl’d and reconfigured for my files…and three times now I have come up with the setupElxAll-x86.exe not installing on the PE image. I have tried to install it ma nually and it keeps coming back with a target version check of vista 0 requires vista SP1 or better. Without this winLpconfg does not install.
so riddle me that one batman?
My next experiment with this is to try copying the winlpconfig file and running it manually just to see if I can get it to work form the command line.

By: iguy

iguy — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 21:45:55 +0000

@Eddie Green – One issue with your solution of Windows 2003 server is the licensing issue. WinPE is free for this style usage. Your solution requires a Server License and technically can only be used once every 90 days per license you have due to the reassignment clause unless you assign a license to the physical server which can not then be used in a VM instance.

The process of creating the WinPE image is fairly quick and automated. I’ve updated the image with new drivers/firmware versions and rebuilt the entire ISO image in a matter of 10 mins. I’m continuing to work on this and improve it to be more hands off than it is today.

By: Eddie Green

Eddie Green — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 16:04:34 +0000

pironet, this only works with hardware that is native to the system…optional hardware Fw update files cannot be added to the HP smart update because they are the incorrect file types that the linux system looks for in the dir structure on the DVD/Cd. for instance the LPE12000 is NOT supported by HP under VMware…they claim that ESX uses the driver that loads the FW and that a FW update is not required(this is total BS). this came directly from the HP storage works website.

Permalink…this doesn’t work either …because you need a console in order to be able to create the dirs and other comands required to run HBanywhere. the console is not robust enough in ESXi to do this…

I am working on a solution for this at the moment…However, the one presented here thus far seem to be the best and along the same lines as mine which is installing Windows 2003 server to a USB drive and installing hbanywhere to it..from there I can take Fw files and utilities at will and add them to the USB install and run them..the caveat so far..the usb image has to be the same as the hardware you are updating..this solution can also be used on HP ILO’s as well, by creating an ISO of the USB key and connecting to the ILO and mounting the ISO image and booting the server from it..it is basically the same as this solution with an added function of being able to install other utilities to it without having to repackage the whole image. Franly, Vmware needs to build the console BACK into ESXi, period. They really do not know, or seem to care, how limited systems administration/maintenance is without it..did we really need this added security?

By: iguy

iguy — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 01:50:43 +0000

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.

By: Peter Van Geem

Peter Van Geem — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 13:45:30 +0000

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 …

By: PiroNet

PiroNet — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:50:47 +0000

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…