Hi, my name is Chris, and I’m a Global Support Engineer for Dell EMC’s Platform Team. Today, I want to talk about updating the firmware on a PowerEdge Cloud C6400 Chassis Manager. Now, in order to do that, there are a handful of prerequisites that we need to meet. We need to have IPMItool and RAC Tools installed on whatever system we’re going to be pushing the update from. If we’re going to be pushing the update remotely, we’re going to need the login credentials for one of the iDRACs, for one of the sleds in the chassis. We’re also going to need to make sure that IPMI over LAN is enabled for whichever iDRAC user we’re going to be leveraging.
Once those prerequisites have been sorted, the first thing to do is figure out the currently installed firmware version of the Chassis Manager. To do that, we’re going to run this ipmitool command that you see on the left-hand side of your screen. Now, I’ve given the command to run it remotely. I’m going to be executing the command locally, and the reason I’ve chosen; to execute it locally is because I don’t want to send my password over the network in plain text. So, in order to push it, we will go ahead and select it and type ipmitool raw 0x30 0x12, and that’s going to spit out a handful of data bytes for us. The only ones that we’re particularly concerned with are the fourth and fifth bits.
If you can’t see the output on the right-hand side of my screen, I’ve transcoded it onto the left-hand side there. As you can see, the fourth and fifth bytes are going to be 03 and 0E. Those are hexadecimal. Once we convert them, they become major version 3, minor version 14. So, our CM firmware version is 3.14 at present. Now, I want to push the update to the next one in line, which is going to be 3.23. I’ve already pulled down the firmware version, so I’ll go ahead and type in ls here, and in green, you can see that I’ve got version 3.23 already downloaded. I’ve unzipped it, and it unzips to that CM file. Since I’ve already got it downloaded here, I should say, I’ll go ahead and run the update. To do that, it’s going to be racadm update -f cm. When I hit enter, the update process will begin. It will take around 10 minutes for the CM to update, and then once it’s updated, we’ll check the update again with IPMItool.
So, I’ll go ahead and kick that off. Here, and we’re back. The CM update has completed successfully. When I cut the video last time, I didn’t capture the output of the command that I ran, that racadm update command, so I went ahead and copied it here for you. When you see this output, you’ll be given control of your prompt back, and you can go about the rest of your administrative tasks for the day. Once you see this, though, you want to give the chassis about 10 minutes to actually run the update and process it. However, there is no reboot required. You don’t have to reboot the sled that you ran it from, you don’t have to power cycle the chassis or anything like that. It should all happen in the background with no impact on your production time.
So, once we’ve given it about 10 minutes here, we’ll go ahead and run that IPMItool command again: ipmitool raw 0x30 0x12. This time, we’ve got similar output, but it is slightly different. Again, the only two bytes that we care about are the fourth and fifth. Since we went to version 3.23, the fourth byte remains the same, and the fifth byte has changed to 17, which, once we convert it from hex to decimal, we see that it’s 23. So, this is a successful update of the Chassis Manager. There’s nothing left for us to do, so I’m going to go ahead and end the video here.
Thank you very much for watching, and have a good rest of your day.
