HP's customized ESXi 4.1U1 fails on HP BL460C (Gen1)

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 3 comments

Published on June 6th 2011 - Listed in VMware Nagios Hardware Virtualization Monitoring

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As VMware admins know, I hope you do, there are some hardware vendors which offer a customized VMware ESXi version for their hardware. Dell does so and HP does it as well. One would think that these versions are really customized for the hardware - and therefore better than the original ESXi, because the vendor knows it best. 

No. FAIL!

Australian sys/network admin Grant Davies (big thanks to down under!) and I just discovered after several days of tests, that the HP Customized ESXi 4.1 U1 ISO does not its job correctly on a HP Blade BL460c server. The OS seems to be running smooth, VM's are running fine but as soon as he wanted to use the Nagios plugin check_esxi_hardware, the plugin failed:

# ./check_esxi_hardware.py https://hpesxiserver root password hp
^CTraceback (most recent call last):
  File "./check_esxi_hardware.py", line 137, in
    instance_list = wbemclient.EnumerateInstances(classe)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/pywbem/cim_operations.py", line 404, in EnumerateInstances
    **params)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/pywbem/cim_operations.py", line 168, in imethodcall
    verify_callback = self.verify_callback)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/pywbem/cim_http.py", line 217, in wbem_request
    response = h.getresponse()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/httplib.py", line 986, in getresponse
    response.begin()
 File "/usr/lib/python2.6/httplib.py", line 391, in begin
    version, status, reason = self._read_status()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/httplib.py", line 349, in _read_status
    line = self.fp.readline()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/socket.py", line 397, in readline
    data = recv(1)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/ssl.py", line 96, in
    self.recv = lambda buflen=1024, flags=0: SSLSocket.recv(self, buflen, flags)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/ssl.py", line 217, in recv
    return self.read(buflen)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/ssl.py", line 136, in read
    return self._sslobj.read(len)
KeyboardInterrupt

At first I thought the HP ESXi Offline Bundle was not installed, but it was. The vihostupdate.pl --query command clearly showed it. My next stupid (but correct!) idea was if the hardware status was shown in vSphere client or not. And to the surprise of both of us nothing was shown:

Conclusion: HP's customized ESXi 4.1 U1 ISO fails to install the CIM providers on an HP Blade 460c (G1). Maybe other server models are also affected, who knows.

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Comments (newest first)

6uellerBpanda from Austria wrote on Jun 28th, 2011:

thanks for the hint. this error has been resolved with 1.1 version of the offline bundle:

esxupdate --bundle=hp-esxi4.1uX-bundle-1.1.zip update
Unpacking cross_oem-vmware-esx-drivers-char-hpilo_400.. ############################################################################## [100%]

Unpacking cross_oem-hp-smx-provider_410.02.07.70-260247 ############################################################################## [100%]

Installing packages :cross_oem-vmware-esx-drivers-cha.. ############################################################################## [100%]

Running [cim-install.sh]...
ok.
Running [/usr/sbin/vmkmod-install.sh]...
ok.
Running [/sbin/esxcfg-secpolicy -p /etc/vmware/secpolicy]...
ok.
The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the
changes to be effective.

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Claudio from Switzerland wrote on Jun 15th, 2011:

I found an interesting HP advisory, talking more or less about such problematics. Its an incompatibility problem of HP:
Advisory: VMware ESX/ESXi 4.x - The Signature of Certain Offline Bundles (HP Management Agents, HP NMI Driver, and HP Providers) for VMware ESX/ESXi 4.x May Not Be Compliant with the Installed Version of VMware ESX/ESXi Operating System
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&taskId=115&prodSeriesId=4091412&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=4091412&objectID=c02845746

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6uellerBpanda from wrote on Jun 15th, 2011:

I have the same problem on a DL380G7 but not with the customized HP ESXi. I installed the official vmware esxi 4.1U1 and then the hp cim offline bundle. in my case the hardware status tab is working correct but pywbem error is the same.
i think this an problem of the cim bundle from hp \'cause i tested the check_datastore.py plugin and it shows me the same error message.

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