PowerEdge R815 firmware update for H700 - how?

Question

I would like to update the integrated H700 firmware in my new R815 from 12.0.1-0091 to 12.3.0-0032. My first thought was to boot from the Systems Build and Update Utility with a copy of the am630_suu_a00.iso that I had downloaded, concatenated, and copied to a portable hard drive attached to a USB port. This worked fine for the Broadcom ports, but when it came to the R815 BIOS and the H700 firmware it would say that it was going to update them, and then say that it was going to reboot (confusingly telling me to 'remove all boot media' though I'm quite sure the SBUU DVD was supposed to stay in, since the instructions there say to keep booting to it til all updates are done). However, the machine simply rebooted. It did not save the pending updates to a partition so it could update during boot, and it did not prompt me to insert a USB key for storage (implied by the text that quickly flashes by on the screen after you hit Apply). I ended up at the SBUU screen again, and firmware updates were not run. Finally I gave up on that approach. I thought maybe I could run the updates directly off of the SUU volume but I had installed Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 and the SUU files apparently only run for x86. So I installed the x86 version of Windows Server 2008 and lo and behold I can click on suulauncher.exe and Run it As Administrator. SUU 6.3.0.267 launches and helpfully shows me the firmware updates I need, and I can select them. But when I click the Update button and it has me confirm that these updates will happen, absolutely nothing happens. You can see a screenshot here where I'm about to click: http://imgur.com/R8jzm From reading online, I think a progress bar is supposed to come up next. I looked at the C:\Dell\suu\support.log file and it shows the following: FINE: com.dell.suu.cm.BundleProcessor.processUpdateButtonEvent() SystemBundlePath = G:\.\repository\PER815-WIN-R258158.XML WARNING: com.dell.suu.cm.CustomBundleXMLGenerator.generateBundleXML() An error occured during the transformation of the XSL while creating the custom XML I thought maybe I had a corrupt SUU image so I re-extracted the ISO but got the same error. Then I thought, why not just run the RAID_FRMW_WIN_R269685.exe update package standalone (using Run as Administrator). This was very encouraging, but then it said 'This Update Package is not compatible with your system configuration.' Why is it not compatible? I have an integrated H700. I am clearly out of my league here. Do others really spend several days trying to update firmware? I'm leaving out the parts where I create a bootable USB drive with DOS and try to run the DOS version of the firmware upgrade with MegaFl.exe, only to find out that the FW872I.rom file can't be found, and the parts where I break down weeping. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Before I go mad.

reybeast1 · Accepted Answer

was there a paticular reason you ran RAID_FRMW_WIN_R269685.exe? You should be running RAID_FRMW_WIN_R269684.exe instead.

argiope · Answer

That's what was suggested on the H700 driver page. I have downloaded and run RAID_FRMW_WIN_R269684.exe as you suggested, and it worked. Many, many thanks.

I still have questions, though. Why doesn't SBUU + SUU work? Why doesn't SUU's suulauncher.exe work? Is it just broken? What will happen when I install the OS on this machine and deploy it? It's a 64-bit OS, as one would expect for a server that can have tens of gigs of RAM. Will I never again be able to update firmware, since apparently they don't run under 64-bit?

This is my first Dell server and frankly the experience has been horrific. The documentation is redundant, confusing, and scattered. So a summary of what I'm looking for might be: what are best practices for keeping one or two servers updated? I don't have a bank of 50 servers where I need everything automated.

reybeast1 · Answer

I'm not sure how you got there, but the driver you dnloaded was for the H700 Adapter (PCI-E card) rather than the H700 Integrated unit, thats why you got the message that it didnt see the hardware. As for why SUU didnt work, its hard to say, but we use SUU extensively and it runs on 2008 R2 x64 just fine. I suggest speaking to tech support about your SUU issues and SBUU, since I bet they would be able to explain what is different in your environment that might be causing the issue. You never know, you may be the first person to see an issue on the model system you have and others may be seeing the same issue and Dell doesnt know about it or may not have seen the issue yet in order to resolve it. Oh, and this link should ask you for your model system, and the OS you are running on it and then show you the proper drivers.

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/index.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

jkohutiak · Answer

I just went to dell support section clicked my server, told it I used 2008R2, selected raid firmware 12.10.6 used the windows application and it prompted for reboot. firmware was updates according to OMSA........ ?????

PowerEdge HDD/SCSI/RAID

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