We just got some 2.93GHz HP Proliant BL460c G6 blades, the Kickstart script halted stating there were no disks in the system. Upon further investigation it seems the Smart Array P410i controller is using a different driver.
We've changed the the following in our Kickstart:
- Any entries starting with 'part'
- bootloader
- ignoredisk. Had to exclude sda in --ignoredisk
Historically, HP SA controllers used the 'cciss' driver:
vmkload_mod -l | grep -iE "cciss|hpsa"
cciss 0x8ae000 0x7000 0x290d140 0x2000 3 Yes
fdisk -l /dev/cciss/c0d0
Disk /dev/cciss/c0d0: 146.7 GB, 146778685440 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 17844 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Now some or all of the newest controllers are using the 'hpsa' driver
vmkload_mod -l | grep -iE "cciss|hpsa"
hpsa 0x961000 0xa000 0x2956da0 0x10000 4 Yes
fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 73.3 GB, 73372631040 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 8920 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
HTH somebody....
Ben
Ben,
Are you using HP RDP (Altiris), or another deployment tool? I'm very interested in your kickstart script and/or changes to RDP.
is this what you are doing now in your kickstart script: (example) part /boot --fstype ext3 --size --asprimary --ondisk sda
?
Hi,
I'm just using plain ol kickstart. I boot my server off CD and then start with 'esx ks=http://mywebserver/ks.txt' and it get's a dhcp address and off we go.
Current layout using p410i looks like:
part /boot --fstype ext3 --size 250 --ondisk=sda --asprimary
part / --fstype ext3 --size 5000 --ondisk=sda --asprimary
part swap --size 1024 --ondisk=sda --asprimary
part /var --fstype ext3 --size 7000 --ondisk=sda
part /tmp --fstype ext3 --size 2048 --ondisk=sda
part /home --fstype ext3 --size 1024 --ondisk=sda
part None --fstype vmkcore --size 104 --ondisk=sda
One thing you can do is run through a text installation of ESX by hand and the Anaconda installer actually creates a kickstart file that is left in /root.
Thanks for your reply Ben.