HP has released a new version of its HP ProLiant Support Pack for Windows Server 2008 (both 32-bit and x64).
In general, a new ProLiant Support Pack contains important updates to storage and network drivers or firmware. Its main purpose this time however, is to support the newly announced HP ProLiant G7 series including its new iLO3 and fix a few minor problems.
If you encounter network instability in high traffic conditions, read until the end!
New is the support for the NC553i 10Gb 2-port FlexFabric Converged Network Adapter, which is capable of standard 1/10 Gbit Ethernet, iSCSI and Fibre Channel (FCoE) in combination with HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 Interconnects in HP Blade System enclosures.
Although there are no obvious improvements for Hyper-V hosts or clusters, I strongly advise to test this new version on less critical servers before implementing the PSP on Hyper-V production clusters.
The official upgrade requirement from HP: Optional
HP ProLiant Support Pack can be downloaded from:
http://bit.ly/9ZM1DI
After investigating if any of the network drivers had also been updated, I found several updates. Notably the HP NC_Series Broadcom 10GbE Multifunction Driver for Windows Server 2008 x64 and R2 x64, which had already been updated in March 2010, caught my eye. We use this one a lot in HP BladeSystems with HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 environments with Hyper-V R2 clusters.
It read: “This driver addresses an issue where the ethernet connection is lost or ping stops for some time during high traffic conditions.”
Official upgrade requirement from HP: at earliest convenience
In fact we have come across large scale implementations of Hyper-V R2 on this hardware with this particular issue. Hopefully this fixes this nagging and difficult to find issue.
Software and drivers for HP BL490c G6: http://bit.ly/a8WZS9
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