HP Proliant Support Pack for Proxmox 4.4, any advice?

Hi all,

Actual question: I am running proxmox VE 4.4 on an HP Proliant DL380g6. “HP ProLiant Support Pack CD for dpkg-based distributions” for this machine only exists for a limited set of older hypervisors (up to xen 6.x, up to debian 6.0, …). Because I am running proxmox 4.4 (based on debian 8), I am wondering if it would be a good idea to try to install the debian 6.0-version of the support-pack. If it installs correctly, with my limited experience, I would have no way of checking if the software would be running correctly, aye, there’s the rub, as the SP is supposed to be able to upgrade the BIOS etc, it would be more than a minor setback if it does not perform as it should. Any advice?

Background:
I am a computer science student, and recently bought my first server. It is a used but clean and fully functional HP Proliant DL380 g6. As this is my first venture into the enterprise-class hardware, it has been quite a learning curve, but that’s why I started this journey in the first place!

The experiment was trying to passthrough a PCI device to a vm (an HP Fibre Optic network card that was included in the purchase, it was a real bargain). IOMMU seems to be functional, but trying to start the vm with the pci-passthrough, I ran into the RMRR-issue. Therefore I need to have the HP Service Pack, so I can take the next step in solving the RMRR-issue, as I don’t see any other way around it. And this is where my doubts arise: would it be safe (as in, not brick my machine) to try to meddle with the bios through a SP meant for debian 6, while running proxmox 4.4?

Keep in mind, I have no real goal with this, it is an experiment for it’s own sake, for the sake of solving the problem, so advice like ‘use another hypervisor’ would be beside the question :wink:

Feel free to give feedback or ask any further questions, and I will provide information (to the best of my knowledge) accordingly!
Thanks very much in advance!
Misur

Basically: probably not IMO. Debian is relatively similar across releases, but if there is some dependency that the BIOS software needs that doesn't exist, then that could cause the software to stop in the middle of some kind of upgrade operation or something. And obviously with a BIOS that's not good

I would just make a partition with a dual boot install of Debian 6 (I'm sure you can still download the ISO and just don't upgrade anything) and run any BIOS updates or whatever from there.

As far as the IOMMU thing, I don't really know. If that requires a BIOS update but doesn't require a piece of software constantly running on the machine, you could boot into your Debian 6 install, run the upgrade, and then boot back into Proxmox. If it requires the software to be running on the machine, I dunno what I'd do.

I'm sorry for my inactivity. I was having my final exams up until two days ago. I have done some research between my OP and now. The reason the passthrough isn't working is because the HP-bios allocates all memory through RMRR (see first 'spoiler'). I have found a full HP servicepack on the HP-websites (version 2016-10, which is the last SP that supports g6-servers). I don't know why it isn't paywalled (it requires a login though), but it's downloading now. I guess that's what you get when you have a messy website: stuff gets through...

I'm going to try that one and upgrade all firmware I can. I suppose it's not going to fix the RMRR issue, because reasons explained in the RHEL-whitepaper below: that's the exact problem I'm running into. After the BIOS-upgrades, I'm thinking of trying the conrep-fix as described on the HP-fix page below. Anyone having any experience with BIOS-scripting on HP-machines? :slight_smile:

SP-download-page
RHEL RMRR whitepaper
HP-fix