As I mentioned one of the functions of my job is to maintain, upgrade and envision our virtualization environment aka VMware ESX 3.5 Server.
Well we recently did quite the face lift to our environment in our PDX datacenter. We upgraded to all diskless Dell PowerEdge 2950 Mark III servers. We boot from a new Equallogic iSCSI SAN using Qlogic QLE4062C iSCSI HBAs.
A problem with this that I discovered at time of implementation is that I could not boot from iSCSI if I enabled Jumbo Frames on the Qlogic HBA. The system would just hang at Qlogic BIOS searching for a bootable LUN. Workaround at the time was not to use Jumbo Frames, while this works performance does take a hit. Given that instead of getting a 9000 byte datagram the server is forced to chop it into 1500 byte datagrams.
Well in doing my normal browsing today I figured well it's been about 4 months since I last looked to see if this has been address and low and behold it has. The firmware for the QLE4062C that works is:
FW: 3.0.1.49
BIOS: 1.14
The process is fairly easy hit the Qlogic website go to Support > Downloads. Look up Linux 32bit FW for the QLE4062C. Download both zip files and extract to a single folder and then burn to a CD. Wasteful I know but the PE2950s don't have floppy drives won't boot from USB floppy either so what are you gonna do.
I boot from a simple Dos boot CD swap in my FW/BIOS CD and then run the following:
iflash /fb - Flashes the BIOS
iflash /ff - Flashes the Firmware
That's all there is to it. Enjoy Jumbo Frames support in an ESX 3.5 environment.
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