Installing Ubuntu on Enterprise Hardware
If you are lucky enough to afford the HP Proliant or Dell PowerEdge rackmount line of servers, you can take advantage of high end processing power and reliable redundancy. But often times enterprise level commercial hardware is not friendly to Open Source systems that are not licensed. You often have to wait a couple of years for driver development to catch up or for provisioning process to accommodate the version of Linux that you want to use. By that time, the hardware version you want to use will no longer be commercially available.
Background
Thanks to Jojo Almario (U.S.A) and Twice Tshwenyane (Botswana) for sharing what they encountered when setting Ubuntu on one of these servers.
I want to give a short summary of an issue that a partner of mine in Botswana ran into while installing Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on an HP Proliant DL-160 Gen9. This was the latest entry level enterprise server from the Proliant line to be used for the iHRIS suite. The fix was not a beginner level fix but even with Ubuntu not being certified on the hardware, there was still a way to install it in it's entirety. Even if the version of Ubuntu were certified on the hardware, there is no guarantee we would not have run into this issue. That being said it is always a good idea to check against the Vendors list of certified OSs.
Problem
Software installation seemed to go smoothly, but once finished, after the final re-boot this error presented itself.
Errors on HP Proliant DL160 gen 9 installs shown before loading GRUB Menu
“[ 0.102457] [Firmware Bug]: the BIOS has corrupted hw-PMU resources (MSR 38d is 330)”
“[ 1.230095] i8042: Can’t read CTR while initialising i8042"
Approach
After Grub fixes, Rescue disk repairs, and such this is what finally worked:
- Install Ubuntu 14.04
- Partition Disks
- When asked about partitioning follow this
- Activate the serial ATA raid devices
- Take note of the array's name
- Select Guided - use entire disk and set up LVM
- Select disk partition
- Write the changes to disk and configure LVM? - Yes
- Amount of volume group to use for guided partitioning:
- Accept default value and press Continue
- It will display new partitions and ask Write the changes to disks? – Yes
- Configuring grub-pc
- Install the GRUB boot loader to the master boot record? Yes
NOTE: You may not need to do the following
- When using a RAID, install grub at:
/dev/mapper/name_of_raid_array
- If you forgot the name of the raid array: ( http://bit.ly/1CWhLQQ )
- Ctrl +alt+F2 to drop into a busybox terminal session.
- Press Enter when prompted to start the terminal.
- Type
ls -l /dev/mapper- Note the name of the raid array
- Head back to your install terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1
This is what worked for us. You may run into a different issue, but just know there is always a way around it.
