Re: XCP: Epilog - Crashes on dual Xeon HP ProLiant systems

["dwight at supercomputer.org" <dwight@supercomputer.org>]

On Friday 30 April 2010 09:32:37 am I wrote:
> Is anyone else running the latest XCP on HP ProLiant DL380
> systems? Or a similar dual Xeon 8-core system? I'm seeing
> spontaneous reboots when under a load.
>

I wanted to follow up to the list on this issue, particularly if 
someone else in the future comes across this with the ProLiant 
series.

The bottom line is that it was a firmware issue (actually, at least 
two different components needed a firmware update. Thanks to Pasi 
and Ian for the replies and suggestions. Also, I was able to repeat 
the odd behavior of 64-bit CentOS 5.4 not installing, while the 
32-bit version worked. This also went away after the firmware 
upgrade.

Here are some more details which probably aren't of interest to the 
list, but I'm sending them along in the hopes of sparing someone 
else who comes across this, and does a Google search.

The key test here was running a continual loop of a -j8 kernel build, 
from scratch. One test failed after 14 hours; another after 9 hours. 
memtestx86 and prime95 in torture test mode worked fine.

The bottom line here is that it looks like we got some machines from 
one of the early manufacturing runs back in July. HP has put in a 
lot of effort in fixing a number of issues since then. One needs at 
least the general firmware update ISO from their website, which is 
presently at Version 9. This is necessary, but not sufficient. One 
of our machines would still crash (though 64-bit CentOS would now 
install). The final missing piece was a CPLD update, which HP 
support was kind enough to quickly send me. With that, all machines 
have been running XCP and numerous VMs quite solidly under a heavy 
load.

In spite of these problems, I have to give kudos to HP for the 
support effort that they've put into fixing all of these problems 
over the past year. Some manufacturers wouldn't put nearly as much 
effort into it.

Thanks again,

   -dwight-