My new XCP-ng environment is just about completely set I just need one more 8tb SAS drive with the same geometry to put into one of the pools on my FreeNAS server. One of the prior 8tb drives was a Sun\Oracle brand and its LFF geometry was slightly off of the other 8tb same model Hitachi drives so I will move that 8tb SAS to a workstation and new one into the pool for VM’s.
I needed to make sure my new XCP-ng Hypervisors hardware was updated to the newest firmware levels after testing initial functionality with XCP-ng with the Dell r710’s I picked up for the Hypervisors. Initially trying to update the r710’s via iDrac produced all types of failures uploading the packages into iDrac. Then trying to update the r710’s via the cli of XCP-ng didn’t have all the software libraries needed for the firmware scripts from Dell to work. I tried Openmanage as well.
Here’s a list of errors I received:
- “The firmware image file is not valid for iDRAC firmware update”,
- the file copied to the partition did not match the original file
- Trying to update through iDrac after extracting the iDrac firmware file.
Well you get the picture so what I ultimately decided to do was take one of my spare hard drives I have put it in a hot swap tray for the r710 migrate all of the VM’s to the other XCP-ng server,take out the boot drive and other drives in the r710 and install Centos 7 to the drive and then run the firmware update scripts from Dell from Centos 7. This worked very well without the errors except to install the needed libraries via yum.
I then just moved all of the VM’s to the other XCP-ng hypervisor and then updated the other r710 from a minimal Centos7 OS install as well.
The big deal about updating my firmware was to make sure that whatever IPMI platform (iDrac from Dell, ILO from HP or IPMI Supermicro) I used was fully updated and useful for when I’m out of town. I chose Dell servers with iDrac because that’s what has the best price point at this time in the surplus market. For some reason there are very little HP servers though I prefer their ILO over Dell’s iDrac.
Now that firmware and bios updates of the hardware are handled onward to make further improvements and other projects!
