As previously mentioned in ESXi 6.0 to 6.5 Upgrade, I recently took over a manufacturing site where patches had been sorely neglected for a couple of years. There were a number of HP DL380 G9 servers still running iLO 1.4. Once I gained access to iLO, I started by upgrading those HP servers to iLO 2.79, the most recent version.
After the mandatory reboot to apply the new iLO firmware, 2/3 of the servers now displayed an iLO login screen warning of Embedded Flash\NAND error:
I found HP Knowledge Base article Document ID: c04996097 outlining my symptoms.
I started by resetting iLO and cycling the server, which had no effect.
The next step was to format the NAND:
- Log into iLO
- Expand
Information > Diagnostics - Click
iLO Health. The status should read something like:
Embedded Flash/SD-CARD | Controller firmware revision 2.10.00 Embedded media initialization failed due to media write-verify test failure - Read the warning:
WARNING: Formatting the Embedded Flash erases all data on the iLO partition and cannot be undone. External providers (like BIOS, Intelligent Provisioning, OneView and FLM) will need to be re-configured. - Click
Format Embedded Flash and reset iLO - Accept the confirmation. iLO will reset.
After the mandatory reboot, the same error was displayed on the iLO login page. The next suggestion in the article (if the NAND reset didn’t work) was to perform a cold boot of the server. I shut down the server, removed the power cord for 15 seconds, plugged in the cord again and started the server.
This time iLO didn’t complain about problems with the flash memory. Hurrah!
References
The articles I referenced when figuring this out were: HPE Integrated Lights-Out 4 (iLO 4) - HPE Active Health System (AHS) Logs and HPE OneView Profiles May Be Unavailable Causing iLO Self-Test Error 8192, Embedded Media Manager and Other Errors