BMC5719 & ESXi

[bishop]

Hi

I have a fairly complicated problem (for me at least). I have a DL380 Gen8 with a HP 331FLR (BMC5719).

Here is a setup. I have a HTTP share (IIS). It has my esxi iso extracted. I then have a iso file that I created using the make command. This iso works file when I use an intel nic , so I know everything works. (I have tried multiple esxi iso images no luck)

I have had a case open with VMware and after more than 2 month they have given me a small clue. What they are telling me is that it seems as if the network cards are already claimed. in the esxi logs once the driver loads (tg3 or ntg3) it tries to probe the nics but the probe never gets a response back. Their suggestion is to use snponly , but that is efi and Gen8 the legacy BIOS only.

I have a few thousand servers that have this config and iPXE really works well for my intel based servers. I have tried using memdisk as an optino just to test but I always get an Illegal Opcode error. I have tried the lastest ipxe build, 3 different FW versions same result.

Reason for trying memdisk option is, I figure if I can get the image into memory, then close the network connections, then do the boot to see if I get a different result.

Any other ideas from anyone ?

[NiKiZe]

you are not including the pciid so it's uneccessary hard for anyone else to identify what is happening.
the iPXE tg3 drivers have some issues - so if you don't see the nic there I'm not entierly surprised.

I'm not entierly sure about your description

In pcbios when a kernel loads it throws everything of iPXE out the window.
What I can suggest if you have issues with iPXE not being able to use the nic, is to use chainloading over the existing PXE stack using undionly.kpxe

[bishop]

So this is the ID -> 14e4-1657

This is process I follow from start to point of failure.
1) Create a iPXE iso using make command with an embedded menu. this points to my http share that hosts the esxi files
2) Mount the iso via the HP iLO
3) Host boot from iso, then starts to pull down and boot ESXi
4) ESXi starts to load it's various modules and fail to find an available network adapter and errors out.

If I drop to the iPXE shell at step 3, I am able to bring all 4 network cards online and they all get a IP address. So I know iPXE network is working.

Just to add, I am using the ISO option because another part of my company "owns" the PXE settings in DHCP and won't allow any changes.

I have tried using undionly.kpxe. I don't think I am doing it right. I boot from my ipxe.iso, then break into the shell and run.

chain http://share/undionly.kpxe

it then respondes ok to the undionly.kpxe then some message about free memory of PXE unload.

Then iPXE 1.0.0+ ..... message appears and then nothing

Out of interest when the nic does it's PXE thing it is display details about the Broadcom UNDI firmware version
I cannot upload screenshots because I cannot access this forum from my work network.

UPDATE:

not sure how to explain this in a way that makes sense, but here goes

I have 2 test machines , a physical and a virtual. I setup auto deploy on a vCenter server so I could access VMware's PXE boot files. I placed these files on a http share.

On the Virtual machine I mount my ipxe.iso file boot from it , let ipxe do it's thing.I check the config and see that the chipset is that of the virtual nic. I then exit to the shell and run

Code:

chain http://myserver/undionly.kpxe.vmw-hardwired

this boot the kpxe from vmware. I ctrl-b to break into the shell. check my config again and it has undionly the chip set. I then start dhcp and I can launch autodeploy

On the physical I mount my ipxe.iso file boot from it , let ipxe do it's thing.I check the config and see that the chipset is 14e4-1657. I then exit to the shell and run

Code:

chain http://myserver/undionly.kpxe.vmw-hardwired

this boot the kpxe from vmware. I ctrl-b to break into the shell. check my config again and it has undionly the chip set. So everything appears good so far. But when I go the start DHCP the system just hangs.

So my speculation is that when I boot from my initial iPXE.iso and it initializes DHCP at this point it locks up the network adapter.

I have also tried using rom-o-matic to create a iso image with only the undionly driver, but each time it uses the 14e4-1657 driver. What am I missing ??