Troubleshooting PXE-E11: ARP Timeout error under VMware ESXi 4 and HPSA 7.8

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I am running HP Server Automation v7.8 in a lab environment on VMware ESXi, managed via vSphere 4.

On the same host I have several small VMs for OS provisioning testing (512MB RAM, 10GB hdd, one NIC on the same vSwitch that HPSA is running on).

DHCP is configured to hand-out addresses in the 192.168.10.151-200 range. On boot of the VM, it receives an IP (eg 192.168.10.198) within seconds.

However, after it receives its IP, a PXE-E11: ARP Timeout error occurs in trying to boot from the DHCP server.

I do not know if this is a HPSA-specific error, as I have seen reports of the PXE-E11 error on various forums. Proposed solutions I have seen so far (changing VLAN settings, for example) have not been applicable to my environment.

Are there any pointers/troubleshooting steps that can be taken to resolve this?

Best Answer

Further investigation showed that dhcpd, while configured, is reporting that PXE is not installed.

An rpm-qa | grep -i pxe shows the HPSA-supplied PXE package is present. Between when it was installed and now, a non-HPSA PXE package was updated, breaking network boot.

Since the underlying OS release is RHEL 5.1, and 5.5 is available, reimaging the machine to a clean OS and fresh install will be a quicker fix than trying to undo the package updates that broke PXE in the first place.

HPSA is picky about its host's package revisions, and apparently in this case the PXE package was altered during a yum update.

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