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HP ProLiant Servers

Installer Compatibility Table

This table is a community maintained matrix of DebianInstaller builds and their compatibility with various HP ProLiant systems. This page does not infer official support from HP. Information on official HP support offerings for Debian can be found on http://hp.com/go/debian. There is a HP support documentation about Debian GNU / Linux 6.0 Squeeze installation on ProLiant servers here. (Hostname downloads.linux.hp.com referred in PDF file should be read downloads.linux.hpe.com.) You may need firmware blobs found at here and here and instructions found at installation manual chapter 6.4.

System

Config

Installer

Installation Report

Summary

Bookworm

DL380 Gen8

Intel Xeon E5-2450L, P420 in HBA-Mode, internal NVMe

12.0.0-amd64-netinst

Install worked flawless.

Booting from P420 in HBA-Mode not supported, so I used an USB-Drive for /boot and put / on the NVMe

DL380e Gen8

Intel Xeon E5-2450, hot swap disks, B320i HW RAID controller

debian-12.4.0-amd64-DVD-1

Install worked flawless.

HW RAID controller B320i [1590:0045] is not supported by hpsa kernel driver and some proprietary blob is probably needed; Easier way is to explicitly disable HP SMART Array in BIOS to access the disks directly through SATA/SCSI controller

DL360 Gen9

Intel Xeon E5-2620 v3, hot swap disks, P440ar HW RAID controller

debian-12.4.0-amd64-DVD-1

Install worked flawless.

Installed with Smart Array mode set to HBA to access disks directly; Both Legacy and UEFI modes works as expected

Buster

?MicroServer ?Gen10Plus

Intel Xeon E2224

buster-10.4.0-amd64-netinst

Nothing unusual in kernel logs.

Installer disappears when loading, black screen. appending "vga=normal fb=false" to the kernel command line solves this issue, see also Debian Release Notes

ML110 Gen9

Intel Xeon E5-2620

buster-10.4.0-amd64-netinst

Nothing unusual in kernel logs.

Had to configure the "HPE Dynamic Smart Array B140i" (software RAID) to AHCI mode

Stretch

?MicroServer Gen10

AMD Opteron Processor (X3xxx)

stretch-4.9.0-4-amd64-netinst

Nothing unusual in kernel logs.

Works fine, but after reboot no display visible. HP recommends to edit the kernel command line (for RHEL), but it does not work with Stretch. Adding "nomodeset" to kernel command line works around the issue in Stretch. Solution is to install firmware-linux-nonfree

Jessie

?MicroServer Gen8 G2020T

Intel Pentium Processor G2020T (original), 2 x KTH-PL316E/8G = 16 GB RAM, Ethernet 1Gb 2-port 332i Adapter (original), Dynamic Smart Array B120i Controller (Single disk, RAID 0) (original), No MicroSD or internal USB

jessie-8.6.0-amd64-netinst

Nothing unusual in kernel logs.

Works fine, no firmware needed. No need to disable AHCI if boot order is configured appropriately in BIOS or iLO4. (System will beep before bootloader starts however.)

DL380 Gen9

Smart Array P440ar, SAS to HP 1-8 G2 Tape Autoloader, RAID-1 and 10

debian-8.5.0-amd64-CD-1.iso

Used HP's "Intelligent Provisioning" to configure RAID devices before starting installation. Installation itself straightforward (100 MB UEFI boot, 500 MB boot, rest LVM PV).

After installation and boot from internal storage some fixes: 1) firmware-linux-nonfree required for tg3. 2) Tape Autoloader not detected until installed kernel 4.6.3 from Jessie backports. 3) kernel parameters: nofb nomodeset nosplash vga=normal video=vesafb:off (may not all have been necessary) to get more than first few boot messages on local console.

DL380 Gen9

Smart Array P440ar, SAS, RAID-1

debian-8.2.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso

Worked fine. Post-install warnings about missing tg3 firmware in update-initramfs: installed firmware-linux-nonfree.

DL380 Gen9

Smart Array P440ar, SAS, RAID-6

debian-8.1.0-amd64-CD-1.iso

(1) Before installation, extract Debian firmware source package and place all tg3 files to root folder of the USB thumb drive for loading network driver during installation (2) Set UEFI BIOS in bootup setting (3) Manual partition during installation, create a 100MB partition and set as type EFI

Worked fine

DL320 G5p

Serial ATA

debian-8.1.0-amd64-CD-1.iso

Worked fine

G1610T Gen8 Microserver

Smart Array B120i, Broadcom NICs

debian-8.3.0-amd64-netinst.iso

Worked fine, no firmware required. Had to set "Enable SATA AHCI" under "System Options" in BIOS to get it booting from hard drive.

Wheezy

DL360p

Smart Array 420i, SAS, RAID-5

firmware-7.4.0-amd64-netinst.iso

Worked fine, firmware cd used for tg3

DL360 G2

Smart Array 5i, RAID-0

firmware-7.3.0-i386-netinst.iso

The Debian installer complains when it tries to detect the cd-rom/dvd. It says it's unable to detect it or it would just hang on that page. I'm not sure why but to fix it: press alt-f1 then enter. It will take you to a shell - check /dev and mount what you suspect is your optical drive (mount /dev/* /mnt works, no need for options) and if it works then you're good to go, alt-f2 to go back to the installer menus. I have no idea why this was necessary, I had /dev/cdrom dvd and sg0 and they all mounted fine which basically means there we're 3 devices pointing to my optical drive and yet the installer is not able to detect it.

If you use the installer on the link it should work fine except for what was mentioned on the installation report. The installer comes pre-loaded with additional non-free firmware blobs which helps as you don't need to modify the official iso's. I know this is a really, really old server but all the more you'd want Debian/linux on it. It's zooming now!

MicroServer G7 N54L

Serial ATA RAID-1

debian-7.6.0-amd64-netinst.iso

You only need to edit the installer commandline to add dmraid=true as explained in SataRaid wiki page. On booting I found the message "modprobe: module dm-raid45 not found in modules.dep" which I fixed editing /usr/share/initramfs-tools/hooks/dmraid and changing dmraid-45 into dmraid

Works fine. VGA is Radeon, and complains about the firmware missing (no acceleration, reduced 2D performance). Installing the firmware-linux-nonfree package solves this issue (not sure if not installing it penalizes the CPU too much though).

Squeeze

DL980 G7

SAS Hotplug

debian-squeeze-di-rc2-amd64-netinst.iso

Worked mostly fine, needs firmware-netxen. NIC 1 & 2 not recognized in squeeze because of the missing firmware. NIC 3,4 worked fine.

BL685c G6

SAS Hotplug

debian-squeeze-di-rc2-amd64-netinst.iso

Worked fine, needs bnx2 firmware

BL685c G7

SAS Hotplug

debian-wheezy-DI-rc1-amd64-DVD-1.iso

Worked fine, needs firmware ; Xen 4.1 kernel crash without dom0_mem limit at 2048 (1024 is too low)

BL465 G5

SAS Hotplug

debian-squeeze-di-rc2-amd64-netinst.iso

Worked fine, needs bnx2 firmware

DL120 G6

SAS Hotplug

debian-6.0.4-amd64-netinst.iso

Worked fine, needs bnx2 firmware

DL580 G7

SAS Hotplug

debian-squeeze-di-rc2-amd64-netinst.iso

Worked fine, needs bnx2 firmware

DL380 G7

SAS Hotplug

debian-squeeze-di-rc2-amd64-netinst.iso

Worked fine, needs bnx2 firmware

DL380 G4

debian-squeeze-di-rc2-i386-netinst.iso

Worked fine, needs tg3 firmware

DL385 G5P

debian-squeeze-di-rc2-i386-netinst.iso

Worked fine, needs tg3 firmware

DL365 G5

Smart Array P400i SAS

debian-6.0.3-amd64-i386-netinst.iso

Installed through iLO2 remote console/virtual CD, Worked fine, needs bnx2 firmware

Lenny

DL580 G7

debian-505-amd64-netinst.iso

The version of the netxen_nic driver in lenny doesn't support the onboard nics - squeeze works fine though

BL685c G6

debian-502-amd64-DVD-1.iso

driver (bnx2x) missing for network controller, should be available in 5.0.3

BL460c G6

Boot from SAN

debian-504-amd64-netinst.iso

Worked fine, needs bnx2 firmware

DL160 G6

Smart Array P410 SAS

debian-504-amd64-netinst.iso

Worked fine

DL360 G5

SAS Hotplug

5.0r0 amd64

Worked fine, needs bnx2 firmware

DL360 G6

SAS Hotplug

5.0r0 amd64

Worked fine, needs bnx2 firmware

DL360 G6

HW RAID B110i

5.0r0 amd64

Hardware RAID logical volumes are invisible to OS, physical disks are exposed to OS, Debian could be installed but has to be handled with great care upon post-installation and when upgrading! See post #3 in this thread at linuxquestions which is a rough howto for CentOS. I would suggest disabling hardware raid and setting up software raid or no raid at all until the driver makes its way on the Linux Kernel, if it ever does.

DL365 G5

Smart Array E200i SAS

5.0.2 netinst i386/amd64, 5.0.2 DVD i386 and amd64

Worked fine, needs bnx2 firmware

DL380 G3

SCSI-RAID-1, RAID-5

Debian 5.0/CD-1

Working 100% perfectly; RAID setup using RAID BIOS option while booting

DL380 G6

Smart Array P411

debian-506-amd64-netinst.iso

Worked fine, needs bnx2 firmware

DL380 G7

Smart Array P410

debian-6.0.3-amd64-i386-netinst.iso

Worked fine, needs bnx2 firmware

ML350 G6

NetXen Add-on card (10gig/dual port)

5.0.2

The netxen_nic driver currently in Debian doesn't support this plug-in card. Need to use an updated kernel (>=2.6.27)

ML310e G8 v2

Non-hotswap

8.0.0 rc3

Works fine if you disable Dynamic Smart Array BS320i and enable SATA AHCI in BIOS. Non non-free firmware required! Installation report in #783066

Daily Builds

Daily builds are available from the d-i devel page.

Known Issues

cciss and hpsa

On a HP ProLiant ML350 G6 Tower server I discovered on a fresh installed Debian squeeze amd64, that I can not use the internal HP Ultrium LTO-2 SAS tape device, connected to a P212 SAS Smart Array controller with zero memory, mounted in a PCI-Express slot. The server has also a 2-port P410i Smart Array controller integrated on the mainboard.

The kernel module cciss, which comes with the 2.6.32 kernel, seems not to be able to handle the tape connected to the P212 controller. No device (/dev/st0) was available. And also lsscsi does only show the DVD drive, but no disks. Looking at /dev/cciss/ one can see, that for the disks and the tape, a device was created. In the kernel documentation (linux-source-2.6.32 package) or on the web one can read about how to handle that situation:

(Extract from /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.32/Documentation/blockdev/cciss.txt)


SCSI tape drive and medium changer support

SCSI sequential access devices and medium changer devices are supported and appropriate device nodes are automatically created. (e.g. /dev/st0, /dev/st1, etc. See the "st" man page for more details.) You must enable "SCSI tape drive support for Smart Array 5xxx" and "SCSI support" in your kernel configuration to be able to use SCSI tape drives with your Smart Array 5xxx controller.

Additionally, note that the driver will not engage the SCSI core at init time. The driver must be directed to dynamically engage the SCSI core via the /proc filesystem entry which the "block" side of the driver creates as /proc/driver/cciss/cciss* at runtime. This is because at driver init time,the SCSI core may not yet be initialized (because the driver is a block driver) and attempting to register it with the SCSI core in such a case would cause a hang. This is best done via an initialization script (typically in /etc/init.d, but could vary depending on distribution). For example:

        for x in /proc/driver/cciss/cciss[0-9]*
        do
                echo "engage scsi" > $x
        done

Once the SCSI core is engaged by the driver, it cannot be disengaged (except by unloading the driver, if it happens to be linked as a module.)

Note also that if no sequential access devices or medium changers are detected, the SCSI core will not be engaged by the action of the above script.


With using a kernel version 2.6.33 and above, there comes the hpsa module.

It used not be used automatically by the kernel. To get it working for me, I installed the kernel from experimental (2.6.36-rc6-amd64) and created the file /etc/modprobe.d/cciss_allow_hpsa.conf with one line of content 'options cciss cciss_allow_hpsa=y' to get the cciss driver to not load if hpsa can handle the devices better, according to this discussion and this information.

/!\ Take notice that /dev/cciss/c0d0, likely your boot device, may suddenly show up as /dev/sda instead. (This did not happen to me, but should be mentioned here)

After a reboot all works as expected and all the devices show also up with lsscsi.

root@debian:~# lspci -knn
...
04:00.0 RAID bus controller [0104]: Hewlett-Packard Company Smart Array G6 controllers [103c:323a] (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Smart Array P410i [103c:3245]
        Kernel driver in use: hpsa
14:00.0 RAID bus controller [0104]: Hewlett-Packard Company Smart Array G6 controllers [103c:323a] (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Smart Array P212 [103c:3241]
        Kernel driver in use: hpsa
root@debian:~# lsscsi 
[0:0:0:0]    storage HP       P410i            3.52  -       
[0:0:0:1]    disk    HP       LOGICAL VOLUME   3.52  /dev/sda
[1:0:0:0]    storage HP       P212             3.52  -       
[1:2:0:0]    tape    HP       Ultrium 2-SCSI   T65D  /dev/st0
[3:0:0:0]    cd/dvd  ATAPI    DVD A  DH16AAS   JHE5  /dev/sr0

For the upcoming stable version of Debian, squeeze, which will use the 2.6.32 kernel as standard, this given information will be hopefully helpful for others. I searched with some breaks nearly a week around to find a way to workaround.

See also the kernel documentation for further explanation.

Need bnx2 firmware

Several HP ProLiant systems use the Broadcom NetXtreme II network controllers. This network controller is supported by the bnx2 driver, but requires external non-free firmware. The installer will detect the absence of this firmware and prompt you for it at install-time. To avoid this, you can modify your install image to include the needed firmware. See this page for a script that does this (Please note that you have to edit the script because it's supporting without changes only the outdated "lenny" and current stable "squeeze" release.). Also details at DebianInstaller/NetbootFirmware. Alternatively, you can obtain non-official CD images with external firmware loading enabled; see Firmware. More details are available in this HP-provided document.

HP Repository

HP provides an apt repository for the ?ProLiant Management Component Pack. Repository details may be found at: http://downloads.linux.hpe.com/SDR/project/mcp

Or you may point apt directly at the repo with this line in /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://downloads.linux.hpe.com/SDR/repo/mcp bookworm/current non-free

There's even a OpenPGP key you can import in apt so it doesn't complain about untrusted sources.

See http://downloads.linux.hpe.com/keys.html for more details.

curl -sS https://downloads.linux.hpe.com/SDR/hpPublicKey2048.pub | gpg --dearmor > /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/hpPublicKey2048.gpg

curl -sS https://downloads.linux.hpe.com/SDR/hpPublicKey2048_key1.pub | gpg --dearmor > /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/hpPublicKey2048_key1.gpg

curl -sS https://downloads.linux.hpe.com/SDR/hpePublicKey2048_key1.pub | gpg --dearmor > /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/hpePublicKey2048_key1.gpg

WARNING - the Debian repository is not always up to date. You can try the Ubuntu repository, something like:

deb http://downloads.linux.hpe.com/SDR/repo/mcp/ubuntu trusty/current non-free
   or
deb http://downloads.linux.hpe.com/SDR/repo/mcp/ubuntu xenial/current non-free

RAID Monitoring

AFAIU, cciss was supported in older distributions, whereas hpsa is the new kind of drivers.

cciss RAID controller driver

See LinuxRaidForAdmins#cciss

hpsa RAID controller driver

See LinuxRaidForAdmins#hpsa


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