HP Offline Bundle for ESXi

[Zarathustra[H]]

Hey all,

My DL180 G6 is supposed to arrive alter today, and I was doing a little reading in preparation.

I understand HP has special offline bundles for ESXi for its servers that contain drivers and utilities.

I have two questions regarding these:

1.) Do they really add any value? Are they worth installing?

2.) The latest offline bundle for the DL180 G6 is for ESXi 5.1. Will it work in 5.5?

Thanks,
Matt

 

[SGalbincea]

Custom HP image is a MUCH better way to go about this,

https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=HP-ESXI-5.5.0-GA-19SEP2013&productId=353

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Custom HP image is a MUCH better way to go about this,

https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=HP-ESXI-5.5.0-GA-19SEP2013&productId=353

Thank you for the suggestion.


Is there a reason you are suggesting 5.5 instead of 5.5U1?

 

[lopoetve]

Thank you for the suggestion.


Is there a reason you are suggesting 5.5 instead of 5.5U1?

It's only about a year newer, maybe year and a half depending on the patch level of the 5.5 build.

 

[ND40oz]

I'd go with the latest June build since they messed up the version numbering of the nic drivers. What a PITA when it came to upgrading from 5.1 to 5.5 because of that.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2082027

 

[SGalbincea]

I'd go with the latest June build since they messed up the version numbering of the nic drivers. What a PITA when it came to upgrading from 5.1 to 5.5 because of that.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2082027

Exactly. Using the Update Manager to update the 5.5 image seems to work better at this time rather than the 5.5U1 image.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Exactly. Using the Update Manager to update the 5.5 image seems to work better at this time rather than the 5.5U1 image.

Thank you, and please bear with me here as you guys have succeeded in confusing me a little bit (which admittedly isn't that hard sometimes, especially before noon on a Monday )

So I am better off installing using the latest 5.5 HP image, and then upgrading to U1 using the VMWare's vanilla ISO?

This is for a standalone all-in-wonder host without vcenter.

Thank you very much,
Matt

 

[ND40oz]

If you're not using upgrade manager to do the upgrades, I'd just use the latest HP ESXi image then. Their latest is missing the patch for NFS disconnects though, so you'll have to manually install that. You won't be able to upgrade their image with the vanilla ESXi one, it'll be missing the VIBs and you'll need to integrate them if you want to upgrade with it.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

If you're not using upgrade manager to do the upgrades, I'd just use the latest HP ESXi image then. Their latest is missing the patch for NFS disconnects though, so you'll have to manually install that. You won't be able to upgrade their image with the vanilla ESXi one, it'll be missing the VIBs and you'll need to integrate them if you want to upgrade with it.

Honestly, I'm wondering if I even need the HP image.

I'm not using HP's SmartRAID card, and the dual gigabit NIC on my DL180 G6 appears to be Intel based, which should just work.

Is there any other benefit to using the HP image that I might be missing?

 

[ND40oz]

Hardware monitoring and the other Insight Manager stuff is really the only other things.