HPE Blade Host not Booting
I was building a Blade Chassis this week and after the OneView profile was applied and I installed the ESXi 6.5 OS I encountered a strange issue upon the first reboot. The Server was stuck just at the initial Bios check stage with Code 0700 and then stopped. Forcing a cold boot got the ESXi server up and running but a further warm reboot produced the same issue. I'd just finished building a few DL360 Gen9 management servers and they weren't having this issue so what was wrong?
After checking the Bios settings in the Profile and testing a small change with no result I hit Goggle with the search "hpe blade dual sd usb warm boot" and found the following advisory:
http://h20565.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?sp4ts.oid=7271227&docLocale=en_US&docId=emr_na-a00016609en_us
The Blades were using dual microSD cards on an internal USB device, the DL360's were using local 600GB disk drives. The fix is a firmware update you can apply via the ESXi command line interface. Sure enough, applied to a host and rebooted and it worked fine.
Note you should check other advisories on your hardware from time to time:
http://h20565.www2.hpe.com/portal/site/hpsc/public/psi/advisoriesResults?sp4ts.oid=7271227
Like this one referring to the same device that stops the server with an All Paths Down error between 17 to 30 days of runtime affecting particular part numbers:
http://h20565.www2.hpe.com/portal/site/hpsc/public/psi/advisoriesResults?sp4ts.oid=7271227
It's not always evident so watch out and safe hunting!
