UCS Firmware bug found, affects PXE Boot

UPDATE:

On the system that discovered the initial bug updating to 2.1(1f) did

 

 

I am working with one of my fellow engineers who is doing an whole vCloud Suite/SRM/kitchen sink deployment.  Anyway he found a bug in the UCS Firmware version 2.1(1e).

When he was trying to do auto deploy his ESXi hosts the would not get DHCP at all.

We looked at the DHCP server, it was on the same VLAN as the hosts, and it was configured correctly and the scope was actually on.  We looked at the UCS settings, the correct mgmt VLAN was set to “Native” so that the NICs could actually see the DHCP reply.

What was noticed was for some reason the VIFs were not coming up on the UCS system.  Now anybody who has used UCS for any period of time is used to seeing VIF errors, especially when setting up blades and installing OS’s.  The typical time you get these errors is when the FI is trying to setup the network before the blade is actually online, these are typically transient and go away quickly.

Anyway, these weren’t the typical errors and the VIFs were truly down and would not come up until the ESXi installer was run off of a mounted ISO.  They would not come up while the NICs were looking for DHCP…odd

They were running the exact same hardware as i had in 4 different FlexPods, 2248’s, B200 M3’s, and an very similarly setup VMware environment.  The ONLY difference was that the firmware they loaded was the latest, at the time, 2.1(1e).  I was still running 2.1(1a).

The engineer downgraded to 2.1(1d) and everything immediately came online and worked perfectly.  Problem solved…well sort of.   I have confirmed on a new install of mine that there is an issue.

I am in the process of building a new system at 2.1(1f) to see if the problem has been fixed.  I will update ASAP.

One thought on “UCS Firmware bug found, affects PXE Boot

  1. I’m assuming you ment 2.1(2a). Its disappointing that they have fixed the TFTP download speed issue, but are still having this issue.

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