Firmware Updates on vSphere Hosts

Recently, HP and Dell have both come out with their latest generation hardware platforms (HP’s Gen8 platform and Dell’s 12th generation platform).  Along with those platforms come updates to embedded management features (HP’s iLO and Dell’s iDRAC 7).

Great stuff.  But sometimes in the real world, we’re faced with hardware that wasn’t manufactured this year.  How does one manage those platforms in a virtualized environment?

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After futzing around with some thin Live CD distributions, I finally downloaded CentOS‘s most recent, stable LiveCD ISO and created a bootable USB drive using UNetbootin‘s “from ISO” option, and put the firmware update software for Linux in the root directory.  When I booted into CentOS from the USB on the HP server, the USB was automatically mounted in /mnt/drive/sda1.  From a terminal window, I upgraded to root privileges (you don’t log in as root, do you?), and ran the flash utility.   It took less than a minute to run, and a reboot showed successful update of the controller firmware.
The drives are still shown as 0.0GB in capacity, but that’s another story.
Yet another reason why a LiveCD should be a standard part of the toolkit.

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