Monthly Archives: April 2015

Weird problems with HP Proliant BL460c Gen9

Hi,

Recently we were flashing the firmware of few of our HP Proliant BL460c G9 blades.

One of the blades seemed to finish flashing the firmware (BIOS/Power Controller/iLO) and I went on to reboot it.

However when I tried to reboot it the blade never finished posting (it never got on to the second post screen).

The solution is very simple. Run the reset BIOS procedure (dip 6 on, blade power on, wait until you see messages on the screen saying you can turn the blade off, reset dip). Whola….the machine will finish the boot process 🙂

Also – during the firmware update process, don’t worry if the machine will reboot a couple of times after you reboot it when you have finished flashing…it is normal!

Bgrds,
FOG

A nice tool for performance monitoring IBM SVC and Storwize products

Hi,

Recently I have been working on a problem (along with the infrastructure team at work) where we were having some performance issues.

Since we do not have IBM’s TPC product I had installed stor2rrd a while back. This tool has proved to be invaluable during our debugging and I highly recommend that you install and use it if you do not have TPC (or any other performance monitoring tool) for your storage infrastructure (and are using IBM SVC/Storwize).

It uses a tool called svcperf from IBM to collect the performance data and then writes the statistic it gathers in RRD files. Although this tool does not have any advanced features it makes it easy to see how your storage is performing.

However it seems that IBM has stopped developing svcperf but hopefully XORUX will keep it up-to-date (at least the data collection part) or re-writes their own product to have native support for collecting the data from SVC/Storwize based products.

Bgrds,
FOG