Dell R730XD Intel X710 NIC Partitioning Issues

PXE is enabled.

Problem is that when I specify the NIC in BIOS to use for booting, it selects Partition 1 of the NIC (even when NIC partitioning is turned off).

As a result, the physical NIC PXE boots, but when IPXE for Auto Deploy tries to set the MAC and get DHCP, it fails because the MAC for the partition is 00:00:00:00:00:00.

According to my folks (VMW) we certified the R730XD, so I'm curious why this occurs.  

When I turn NIC partitioning on, I see in BIOS that a virtual MAC address of 00:00:00:00:00:00 is used for the partition.

Hi,

Did you enable PXE in the BIOS under network settings? IF you go into BIOS is there an option under device settings to set the MAC?

When NIC partitioning is enabled 00:00:00:00:00:00 is the default MAC, so that the OS can assign it.

downloads.dell.com/.../fw_release.txt

“- If Virtual MAC Address, Virtual FIP MAC Address, Virtual World Wide Node Name 

     or Virtual World Wide Port Name is not set in the HII interface, it incorrectly

     displays the factory MAC address instead of the default MAC address '000000000000'

“

You are on the lastest NIC firmware 16.5.0 right?

That's correct.

All BIOS and firmware are at the latest I was able to download anyway when we received the servers.

The firmware for the NIC is 16.5.20

Yes.

This is a problem then because that makes this NIC incapable of using VMware Auto Deploy, which basically cripples our operations.  We were told that we would have a supported configuration.

Can you create a Tech support report from the iDRAC troubleshooting section or boot to our live image and run a DSET report?

http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=CWF92&fileId=3431135544&osCode=W12R2&productCode=poweredge-r730xd&languageCode=EN&categoryId=DI

<ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed from this post by Dell>

Was there a solution to this PXE boot issue with the Intel NIC. I have a customer also experiencing PXE boot failures.

McD

The problem was the iPXE firmware for us.

Auto Deploy uses a particular version, and the pub iPXE firmware at ipxe.org pays attention to the hardware MAC if the MAC of the partition 0 interface shows up at 00:00:00:00:00:00.

Using an Ubuntu PXE Server was fine - it was just iPXE that had the problem.

I told our devs, and they respun auto deploy, but I have no idea when it will be released yet.

It's been a long time since you posted this but did the PXE issue get resolved for DMCDORMAN?

With PXE, spanning tree protocol on the switch can be troublesome.  If spanning tree is enabled on the switch port that the X710 is connected to, then I recommend setting portfast to enabled.  portfast sometimes has different names on different switches.

"When NIC partitioning is enabled 00:00:00:00:00:00 is the default MAC, so that the OS can assign it."

The above statement is actually inaccurate.  The default MAC address is the permanent MAC address that is burned onto the card during manufacturing.  There is the permanent MAC address and the virtual MAC address.  Only one of those two is active at a given time.  The value of the virtual MAC address by default is all zeros (00:00:00:00:00:00).  When the value is all zeros, that indicates that the virtual MAC address is not the active MAC address.  Instead, the permanent MAC address is active when the value of the virtual MAC address is 00:00:00:00:00:00.  The OS doesn't set a MAC address on the adapter.  There is a way to set a locally assigned address (LAA) in the OS on an adapter but that's not default behavior.

When jjahns saw the MAC address value of 00:00:00:00:00:00 from their iPXE server, that's simply because the iPXE server had outdated components. After updating those iPXE components, the correct MAC address was being detected.