Tuesday, July 7, 2015

OVM/ OVM Server 3.3.2 and HP DL580 GEN9 Certification / Attempting to boot from hard drive (c:)

Oracle VM Server 3.3.2 can be installed into a HP DL580 GEN9 server using the legacy bios and MBR option.


Using the Legacy bios, The OVM installer can install OVM Server 3.3.2 without any problems .
But unfortuneatly, OVM Server 3.3.2 can not boot in the first reboot just after the installation.
It seems like it is an issue wit MBR, as MBR can not be read during the server boot and server displays the following message: "Attempting to boot from hard drive (c:)"
Note that: Using HP's Intelligent Provisioning is not a solution for this.


HP DL580 GEN9 is a new server, released in 2015 and OVM 3.3.2 is the Oracle 's new version OVM Server released in February 2015.  So,these two technologies are pretty new and this kind of problems may be expected.

Actually, In ULN, there is a certification information about these two products..
According to ULN, OVM 3.3.2 is certified with HP DL580 GEN9, but the kernel provided there is not the current kernel . It is an old kernel and it is not the one you get when you download the OVM Server 3.3.2 nowadays.

Actually, as current OVM Server 3.3.2 kernel is a high version kernel which seems like a Oracle Linux 7 kernel, this seems to be related with Redhat 7 Bug , Bug 1148105 - MBR is not written correctly after install.

If that's the case, the booting issue(Attempting to boot from hard drive (c:)) may be fixed by correcting the MBR after the first install. I mean, after the installation when the reboot dialog box appears , we can press ALT+F2 button and connect to the shell , where we execute the required command for rewriting the mbr into the relevant location in disk.
ALT+F2 -> dd if=/usr/share/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sdb (supposing sdb was the input given for the MBR location in the installation, the right location for mbr )
Once the rewrite complete, we can reboot and see what happens..

On the other hand, there is a workaround. That is, using Oracle VM Server 3.3.1 is a workaround for this.

There is no certification info in HP 's website for HP DL580 GEN9, but this configuration is supported for HP DL580 GEN8 and it is working in HP DL580 GEN9, too.

Ref: HP - Linux and OVM Support matrix:


So, OVM 3.3.1 can be installed into HP DL580 GEN9 in Legacy BIOS mode and it can boot without any problems.
In case of the management, using the latest version of VM Manager, VM Manager 3.3.2 with Oracle VM Server 3.3.1 is also supported.

Anyways, the best workaround for now is using Oracle VM Server 3.3.1 and Oracle VM Manager 3.3.2  for HP DL580 GEN9 platforms. 
We have used this configuration and seen this working properly.
Likewise, we suggest using Oracle Linux 6.5 in case of Using Linux OS on HP DL580 GEN9  systems, as Oracle Linux 6.5 is supported on HP DL580 GEN8. We have actually tried this and seen this working properly, as well.

1 comment :


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