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 ?