How to upgrade firmware of a HP ProLiant G9 server (upgrading firmware from version 2.20 to 2.30)

As I posted earlier, we was facing embedded Flash/SD-Card related issues: Lost connectivity to the device mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0 backing the boot file system error on vSphere client host summary page, these hosts are running on HP ProLiant G9 servers. As this was second time when we saw this error so instead of fixing it myself, contacted HP support to find out the root cause of the same. The response of hp support was as expected, 

Response from hp support:  That version 2.20 has been removed from our site due to it causing issues with server components, including the embedded flash cards. . The new iLO firmware 2.22 addresses/fixes issues with the embedded cards disconnecting.

In our further discussion they suggested us for firmware upgrade from 2.20 to 2.22 or to the latest available version 2.30.

There are many ways to upgrade firmware, few are as follows:

• Upgrading firmware directly from iLO using firmware update bin file. 

First download the firmware version 2.30  or any other version from HP site.

Getting the firmware setup .bin file is little tricky.To find the .bin file, first extract the firmware setup zip, there you would find an executable file now again extract the executable file by using 7-Zip/WinRAR etc. By this way you will get the firmware upgrade .bin file.

Now connect to iLO, G9 servers having iLO version 4,

Go to Administration => Firmware => form here one can upgrade the firmware of a HP server by uploading the firmware upgrade .bin file.

iLO will reboot during the firmware upgrade and Server reboot is not required.

• If your is running Esxi on it then you can even upgrade the firmware directly from DCUI or using SSH.

Note: If you would extract the downloaded firmware setup zip folder, you would get a Readme file, this file would have instructions to upgrade firmware from within esxi console.

or Follow these steps to upgrade HP server’s firmware from inside the Esxi console:

Put the intended host in maintenance mode however most of the case the reboot is not required but just in case. Now Open putty and connect to host using root credentials.

Copy the downloaded firmware zip (CPxxxxxx.zip) file to a temp or any directory and then browse to that directory.

• Now from the same directory, unzip the Smart Component:

                unzip CPxxxxxx.zip

•  To ensure CPxxxxxx.vmexe is executable, execute the commmand:

                 chmod +x CPxxxxxx.vmexe

•  And then to finally upgrade the firmware run this command,

              ./CPxxxxxx.vmexe

Now follow the directions given by the Smart Component.

Once the firmware upgrade would complete, iLO will reboot and If instructed, reboot your system for the firmware update to take effect however it didn't ask us for reboot but anyways we rebooted the server.

• If you want to upgrade the firmware as well as other server component, then use HP SPP (Service pack for ProLiant), using it you can upgrade individual server component/driver or everything.

What you need to do is, just download the latest/intended HP SPP ISO file from HP Support Site, Now open iLO remote connection and mount SPP ISO as virtual CD/DVD and reboot the server.

During server boot choose boot from CD/DVD.

Once the Server would boot up using the SPP ISO, you get two options to upgrade server components: Automatic and Interactive, chose one as per your convenience. 

I personally prefer Introspective mode, as using this mode I can upgrade individual components and if any upgrade failed one would get the info right there. 

That’s it... :)