Last week I replaced a HBA in a Dell PowerEdge R710. After the card was replaced I opened a KVM session and watched the successful boot process. All good.
My colleague began flipping through the various F screens and when he reached F11 the following appeared:
“…Found MegaRAID SAS controller on PCI bus 3:0:8 with firmware version 12.3.0-0032. The firmware is known to have issues that could cause the system to hang or crash…”
I don’t usually browse through the console screens but this obviously doesn’t look good. We proceeded to check every host of that model and sure enough they all have the alert.
OK. Google it. Nothing. really? nothing? seriously? This is a pretty common server running a very popular OS but we were unable to find any references to this alert.
Next step was to take down the information and check the Dell support site for information. Nothing specific found. We looked through the list of available firmware on the site but were unable to figure out what is the version to install. What caused us even more confusion was that the existing firmware version we had looked pretty old. That would be expected if it wasn’t for the fact that Dell support had over the past 3 months created firmware update packages customized for our hardware. They took our logs to get all our specs and provided us with an ISO with all updates that we’re applicable to us. Obviously this got overlooked.
Eventually a support call was opened and DELL were able to confirm to us the firmware version we should use. I say confirm since it was Jean-Francois Myre, Senior Systems Architect at Itex Inc. who researched this and discovered the answer.
Here is a screenshot from the Dell Repository Manager showing the correct firmware to be installed:
If you are running on a PowerEdge R710 you may want to check your firmware and verify if ESXi is giving an alert.