Once a while web-based update for firmware on IBM FlashSystem doesn’t work. Or it takes long time to finish. Then there is a time to make update manually by following steps:
Download firmware update packages you would like to apply
Log to FlashSystem using SSH and run command to clean failed or old files:
cleardumps -prefix /home/admin/upgrade
Go back to your computer and upload downloaded firmware payload files into FlashSystem using following commands:
Couple days ago I had following problem. I wanted to install the newest firmwares on Lenovo (IBM) x3650 M5 server. I used Bootable Media Creator to create CD with latest firmwares for this machine. Problem came when I looked into firmwares BOMC wanted to upgrade:
Problem was that I wanted to upgrade firmware for SAS card ServeRAID N2225 which was installed in this server. This card is also supported and there was also new firmware downloaded into BOMC directory:
It looked like BOMC didn’t detect card in server and therefore it didn’t put it into the list of firmwares which should be upgraded. I tried other server which was in same configuration and it was same result. Then I tried to press ALT+F1 combination in BOMC. New bash shell came on screen. I tried list directory “ls -al” and I was there are all the files with firmwares. So I have tried to run binary with mentioned firmware:
Tadaaaaa….firmware upgraded. It looks like Lenovo has some bugs in its tool BOMC. I hope Lenovo support will get at least close to IBM support.
One of our users reported problems with vMotion after firmware upgrade of IBM server. Firmware were upgraded using BOMC (utility to create ISO images to upgrade IBM server to the lastest versions available).
After upgrade user was not able to do vMotion. They received following error:
Host CPU is incompatible with the virtual machine’s requirements at CPUID level 0x1 register ‘ecx’.
After couple minutes of googling I found out following official articles:
Based on information there is change when you do firmware upgrade. Sometime (from some version) AES feature is Enabled and sometime is disabled. This setting cannot be changed in BIOS and this is really sad. So let’s look at the way you can change it.
In second mentioned article IBM suppose to download some prepared ISO image called BoMC-2.20-uEFI-AesEnable-to-enabled-vmotion-fix.iso. But I couldn’t find this ISO image. So I had to use other way around. I downloaded IBM Advanced Setting Utility. I downloaded and installes version for Windows 64b. You need your RSA card to be accessible through network. Then you can run following command to check actual value:
You can check it on all ESX servers. To decide whether feature should be enabled or disabled you this article. We need to change it to the same setting using following command:
asu64.exe set UEFI.AesEnable Disable –host RSA_IP_ADDRESS –user RSA_USER –password RSA_PASSWORD
When values are the same on all ESX server you are able to do vMotion. I was kinda mad on IBM, because I would preffer to change this value in BIOS instead of some application.
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