BL460c G6 automatically powers on when shut down

Multiple times I've experienced that an ESX host automatically boots when you shut it down. This is fairly annoying when you try to shut it down to, for exampel, have a memory stick replaced by the hardware guys - just to find out that it powers itself back on after a couple of minutes.

I've seen it before but haven't really spend much energy on it. However, this other day we had a very consistent example where the blade server powered itself everytime you shut it down - or powered it off - after a couple of minutes.

Any 'auto power on' features in the ILO and enclosure OA were disabled. Also ASR was disabled in the BIOS.

The culprit turned out to be Wake-On LAN in the BIOS. As soon as this feature was disabled, the blade server stayed powered off. As far as I know we don't have any devices on the network broadcasting magic packets, but it still happened. As long as you're not using the DPM setting, it should be safe to turn off the WOL feature.

Disabling cores in BIOS for BL460c Gen8

Due mainly to licensing rules imposed by Oracle and Microsoft, there is an increasing demand for either locking VMs to specific hosts (like with VM-host-affinity rules) or for decreasing the number of physical CPUs or logical cores in the ESX hosts.

For HP hardware it is possible to order Blade servers with 2, 4, 6, or 8 cores - at least for BL460c Gen8. But in my company, we like to keep things as standard as possible, not having too many different hardware models.

As per Gen8, it is possible to disable a given number of cores in the BIOS. It has to be increased/decreased in pairs from 1 to 8. So as a minimum you can have 1 core enabled on each CPU. It is not possible to deactivate one of the physical CPUs.

Boot directly into BIOS - Workstation 8

In Workstation 8, there's a nice new little feature that let's you boot directly into BIOS from the power on button. Instead of having this option under edit settings it has been moved to the power on button itself.

A small thing perhaps, but quite practical.

How to enable 64-bit in BIOS on HP server

To be able to run 64-bit VM's in VMware ESX server, then Intel-VT technology needs to be enable in BIOS. Furthermore, to enable EVC (Enhanced VMotion Compability), No-execute memory feature should be enabled, see below.

1. Go to BIOS (press F9 during boot)
2. Go to Advanced Options -> Processor Options -> Intel ® Virtualization Technology
3. Choose Enable
4. Furtermore, to enable VMware EVC, enable 'No-Execute Memory Protection' (just above Intel-VT).
5. Save and exit


NB: All hosts in your cluster should have the same BIOS settings. If not, this can result in VMotion issues.