I have an HP Proliant DL385p Gen8 box together with a HP/OEM installation disk of Windows Server 2012 R2 Essential.
On the iron I've installed Ubuntu Server 12.04.5 64bit plus xfce 4.1 (horrible: avoid it!) and KVM latest version available in ubuntu repository at the time of this writing (Dec2014).
The windows server is going to run as a guest over KVM. I have plenty of configurations like this perfectly working where, however, the Windows software is not OEM..
Here, a little while after the windows server installation CD boots up in the guest, it stops with the following message:"This system is not a supported platform": the hardware platform must be an HP and the actual one is not. No way.
HP supports this scenario (http://h20564.www2.hp.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c00970200) suggesting ways for the hypervisor to pass BIOS and System information from host hardware to guests. Unfortunately KVM is not included...
Reading the redhat documentation (https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Virtualization_Administration_Guide/sect-smbios-sys-info.html) helped in finding a solution:
First you need to dump the HP BIOS information by running the “dmidecode“ command, to retrieve the information you need:
# dmidecode 2.11 SMBIOS 2.6 present. 35 structures occupying 1145 bytes. Table at 0x000FB330. Handle 0x0000, DMI type 0, 24 bytes BIOS Information Vendor: HP Version: A28 Release Date: 07/12/2014 .... Handle 0x0001, DMI type 1, 27 bytes System Information Manufacturer: HP Product Name: Proliant DL385p Gen8 Version: Serial Number: 099999AB UUID: 1A3FD5918-FA32-56B3-8000-3A5C8B66F003 Wake-up Type: Power Switch SKU Number: 947382-432 Family: ...Now just open your Guest XML file (in /etc/libvirt/qemu/) and, as per redhat instructions, into <os> tag add:
<smbios mode="sysinfo">and then, somewhere into <domain> tag add this, with values from dmidecode output:
<sysinfo type='smbios'>
<bios>
<entry name='vendor'>HP</entry>
</bios>
<system>
<entry name='manufacturer'>HP</entry>
<entry name='product'>Proliant DL385p Gen8</entry>
<entry name='serial'>099999AB</entry>
<entry name='sku'>947382-432</entry>
<entry name='UUID'>1A3FD5918-FA32-56B3-8000-3A5C8B66F003</entry>
</system>
</sysinfo>
And that’s all, folks! Now just start your Guest and the Windows Server installation should pass the HP hardware check. Please note that Windows 2008 didn't need the UUID field.
thx!!
ReplyDeleteHi, is that valid also for W2k12 HPE ROK ? Thanks
ReplyDelete