"Boot from local drive" menuitem is broken on HP ProLiant BL460c G6 (c7000 blade chasis)

[jones]

Hi Guys,

The “boot from localdrive” menu item on fog menu is hanging on :

I assume it chooses a wrong boot device as two storage controllers are installed :

0c:00.0 RAID bus controller: Hewlett-Packard Company Smart Array G6 controllers (rev 01)
06:00.0 Fibre Channel: QLogic Corp. ISP2432-based 4Gb Fibre Channel to PCI Express HBA (rev 03)
06:00.1 Fibre Channel: QLogic Corp. ISP2432-based 4Gb Fibre Channel to PCI Express HBA (rev 03)

The boot device logical drive sits on the HP smart array controller.
Once giving priority to the localdrive before the NIC PXE boot on the bios boot sequence menu, the host will boot up with no issues.

Can you please help with this ?

Aviram

[george1421]

Since FOG seems to be using SANBOOT for exiting is your HP Server in BIOS (legacy) mode or UEFI. The answer is different based on the mode the server firmware is in.

For this server, go into the host definition. Lets assume this sever is in bios mode, change the BIOS exit type to GRUB First Hard Drive. Hint: You may need to experiment with the ext types to find the right one that works with your hardware. The rEFInd exit type is for UEFI hardware.

The other thing I can say (at least for my company) we don’t have servers pxe boot through FOG. When we go to image a physical machine we press the F10 or F12 to bring up the boot manager during the system POST. Then from the boot manager we select PXE boot into FOG. This way we are sure there is no way to accidentally reimage a server. We have a rule that a technician must be in front of the server before it is allowed to be reimaged. If you use this method the hard drive is always defined first in the boot order.

[jones]

@george1421 said in “Boot from local drive” menuitem is broken on HP ProLiant BL460c G6 (c7000 blade chasis):

rEFInd

Thanks George,

These servers are in bios mode, when changing the Host Bios Exit Type to Grub or Grub_first_hdd i am getting a red screen :

when changing the Host Bios Exit Type to REFIND_EFI i am getting this red screen:

when changing the Host Bios Exit Type to “exit” i am getting a “clone failed” error and then the host reboots.

the other options like grub_windows or grub_cdrom doesn’t make sense in my configuration.

“The other thing I can say (at least for my company) we don’t have servers pxe boot through FOG. When we go to image a physical machine we > > press the F10 or F12 to bring up the boot manager during the system POST. Then from the boot manager we select PXE boot into FOG. This way > we are sure there is no way to accidentally reimage a server. We have a rule that a technician must be in front of the server before it is allowed to > be reimaged. If you use this method the hard drive is always defined first in the boot order.”

We are managing remote datacenter with hundreds of grid nodes, we cant afford interactive startup everytime we want to fog a system.
as well as from some weird reason, FOS fails to load the firmware/driver for this networking Emulex 10GBE networking card when i am using the bios boot menu(F10), while FOS manage to load the NIC firmware/driver correctly if the first boot device is set to the NIC on BIOS boot sequence.

Aviram

[Sebastian Roth]

@jones said in “Boot from local drive” menuitem is broken on HP ProLiant BL460c G6 (c7000 blade chasis):

when changing the Host Bios Exit Type to “exit” i am getting a “clone failed” error and then the host reboots.

Type “exit” works in a lot of cases for BIOS systems. Can you take a picture of the error an post here. I’ve never seen one line this.

Edit: Seems like this has been reported on the iPXE mailing list years ago: http://lists.ipxe.org/pipermail/ipxe-devel/2013-January/002141.html

Follow this thread up a couple of posts and it will point you to this article: http://ipxe.org/appnote/work_around_bios_halting_on_ipxe_exit

We do have GRUB4DOS in FOG and so I am wondering why using those doesn’t help in your case. But maybe it needs to be a special set of GRUB4DOS commands to boot the ProLiant servers?!?

And you might wanna read through this as well: https://github.com/puppetlabs/Razor/issues/264

[jones]

Thanks Sebastian,

My mistake, apologies, it was chainloading failed as suggested in the above pic.

Aviram

[Sebastian Roth]

@jones Ok, thanks for the picture. Did you read trough all the other things I mentioned?

[jones]

Thanks Sebastian,

I have read it a while ago, but looks like I missed your edits…
Unfortunately I just lost access to these servers just now as I moved a company (last day), as a workaround, we just changed the bios to boot from local hard drive after we fogged them.

Thanks for your help,

Aviram