Failed Firmware Updates on PowerEdge T630

Hello,

While updating firmware via the LC on a PowerEdge T630 today, I ran into several issues. It seems that some of them, such as "signature could not be verified" (or related errors) when updating from a local SUU ISO (created via DRM) were caused by the LC firmware being too far out-of-date. Updating the LC firmware by itself first seemed to resolve this issue. I still could not update successfully via FTP because even though it would pull the catalog, it would fail to download the packages every time.

So, after updating LC firmware I was able to run updates from the SUU ISO I made for the T630 via DRM. I was using Windows x64 DUPs since I was updating thru the LC, because this was an ESXi host so I could not update from within the OS. Anyway, I kicked off an update for BIOS, RAID and two NIC firmwares. The BIOS and RAID each said they failed - the error for each was "The firmware image specified in the operation did not apply successfully. An internal error may have occurred.". The two NIC firmwares succeeded.

After the subsequent reboot, I noticed that the BIOS version had updated to the new version on the boot screen and thought this was interesting. Back in the LC, I checked current firmware versions and sure enough, it showed the new version for both BIOS and RAID. This concerned me because I was worried they were in a half-installed state. I wasn't sure whether to try and do a rollback or to try the update again, but the recommended action in the LC log entry did say "retry the operation", as did a couple articles I found on failed BIOS upgrades on Dell servers (although they didn't match my situation exactly).

So, I decided to try again but first I checked the checksum of the packages in my ISO vs. the same packages available individually from the Dell site, and the checksums for both the BIOS and RAID packages matched exactly (so they weren't corrupt or anything). So, in the LC, with the same SUU ISO mounted, I kicked off another update, this time for only BIOS (even though the version said it was already current). This succeeded, so after the subsequent reboot, I did the same for RAID, and that succeeded as well.

After that, I rebooted back into LC to verify versions again, then rebooted into the BIOS config, and then the RAID config utility (Ctrl-R), to ensure those both looked good, and they did from what I can tell (virtual disks showed up, all settings showed up, firmware versions were current, etc.). So finally I booted back into the OS. Lastly, I checked iDRAC and it looked good except Storage showed no disks or controllers, and the Rollback page on Update/Rollback had error RAC0508 and showed nothing. I found an article that mentioned the Storage issue and suggested an iDRAC reset, so I did that, and sure enough, Storage now shows up properly, as does the Rollback page.

So - my question - is there anything else I can do to verify that the BIOS and RAID updates did in fact succeed completely? Or should I just call it good at this point and hope for the best? Anytime I see any failure on any firmware update it makes me very nervous, and if there is anything I need to do to try and resolve it, now would be the time since the server isn't really in full use yet. Everything seems to look good - but I'd like to know for sure somehow if there is a way to confirm.

Any help is much appreciated!