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FIXING ESXI 6.5 ON HPE G7 SERVERS3 MIN READ

So there I was, moving VMs off of my main host (DL380 G7, 2x x5690’s, 192GB RDIMM), getting ready to replace the 8x 300GB RAID10 array I’ve been using for a while now with some 1TB disks and SSDs, awesome, right?

So the host was powered down, ready for an upgrade, and being the logical guy I am I decided to do some software upgrades.

I used the latest SPP and ran that through, for some reason I was using a BIOS from 2010? Once that was done I had updated firmware, so I moved onto ESXi. I’ve been running 6.0.0U2 for the longest time and thought this would be the ideal time to upgrade.

I got the HPE official ISO, ran through the upgrade, waited for it to boot annnddd….

 

PSOD.

After some digging, it would appear this is actually a known issue with most G7 servers (unsure about G6).

The issue.

It would appear that one driver is causing this in the 6.5 image,  “hpe-smx-provider” (650.03.11.00.17-4240417). Installing the standard ESXI 6.5 ISO does allow the server to boot, but is missing a lot of drivers and does not give the pretty all-inclusive system stats that the HPE ISO does.

So what now? I didn’t want to settle for the standard image, so I did the following to bundle the U2 hpe-smx-provider into the 6.5 image.

For the lazy: There is a link at the end of this post with a download to the compiled ISO.

Using PowerCLI Image Builder.

The first thing you want to do is download PowerCLI for Windows.

Once that is all installed, grab both of the following files and put it somewhere easy, I just shoved them in C:\HPE.
VMware-ESXi-6.5.0-OS-Release-4564106-HPE-650.9.6.0.28-Nov2016-depot.zip
VMware-ESXi-6.0.0-Update2-3620759-HPE-600.9.6.5.7-Dec2016-depot.zip

I also renamed them to make it easier for myself, “ESXIHP65” “ESXIHP6U2”.

Once that is done, fire up PowerCLI, and do the following commands:

  1. Add the 6.5 image bundle
    Add-EsxSoftwareDepot -DepotUrl C:\HPE\ESXIHP65.zip
  2. Check the profile was added.
    Get-EsxImageProfile
  3. Clone the profile so we can work on the clone.
    New-EsxImageProfile -CloneProfile HPE-ESXi-6.5.0-OS-Release-6* -Name "ESXICUST"
    Set Vendor to whatever, I used ‘Custom’.
  4. Check the profile was added.
    Get-EsxImageProfile
  5. Remove the driver from the clone.
    Remove-EsxSoftwarePackage ESXICUST hpe-smx-provider
  6. Add the 6.0U2 image bundle
    Add-EsxSoftwareDepot -DepotUrl C:\HPE\ESXIHP6U2.zip
  7. Check the profile was added.
    Get-EsxImageProfile
  8.  Now we can see both driver versions from the bundles.
    Get-EsxSoftwarePackage | findstr smx
  9. Add the good driver into the custom image.
    add-esxsoftwarepackage -imageprofile ESXICUST -softwarepackage "hpe-smx-provider 600.03.11.00.9-2768847"
  10. Export your custom bundle to ISO.
    Export-EsxImageProfile -ImageProfile ESXICUST -ExportToIso -filepath "c:\HPE\ESXI65CUST.iso"
    You should now have ‘ESXI65CUST.iso’ in your working folder.

Result.

So, once that’s all done mount the ISO however you like, I use iLO and go through the install as per normal, continue through the warning about CPUs of this socket being depreciated. And, eventually….

BOOM.

Post edit: You must do a clean install for this to work, upgrading will not work as the offending driver will not be overwritten. 

If you’re lazy and trust me enough then here is a link to the compiled ISO, ready to be installed.

I hope this helped some of you out, best of luck! MM~~

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