On a recent client engagement fellow Xtravirt colleague Darren Woollard and I were awaiting the build out of the IBM HS22 blades the client had procured for our usage as ESXi5 hosts. IBM services came in to complete the configuration of these servers which was stated to only take a mornings worth of work. Unfortunately due to a very strange default setting that the HS22 blades seem to come with it took us almost four days and the below work around to fix the “problem”.

Our problem was that the second NIC on all the blades was set to iSCSI by default so if we looked in the BIOS the NIC wasn’t presented due to this configuration. The only way we found we could get it back to a normal NIC for usage in ESXi was to do the following:

1. Boot the server into a Microsoft OS (This was a fun part for us as all our hosts were stateless in readiness for Auto Deploy so we had to “steal” a drive from another server)
2. Download the OneCommand Software from the IBM website
3. With the OneCommand software installed ,Select the OCManager program from the MS Windows Start Menu.

4. The application will launch and enumerate the adapters; this typically takes 30 seconds to populate the left hand pane.

5. The populated pane should resemble the screenshot below.

6. Highlight the OCm adapter. The Personality section will reveal the NICs are to set to iSCSI.

7. Click the NIC-only radio option.

8. Click Apply.

9. Reboot the Blade.

10. That’s the “re-configuration” complete for this blade, now to repeat the above steps across all your remaining blades .

I’m sure there must be a simpler way of fixing it but we spoke to a few IBM services people and the only way to fix it seems to be this which we find very hard to believe.

Gregg