After installing HP's PSP 8.73 on RHEL5 with a G7 Blade, I end up with 4 grub entries
1 The Standard RHEL
2 HP (choosen as default)
3 HP hpahcisr
4 HP mptlinux
I'm confused as to why I get all these entries, does entry 2 contain 3 and 4 ?. If I boot from 2 will I be booting with all the HP drivers(3 and 4) and an HP kernel ?
You're fine using the default selection.
The current ProLiant Support Pack for your operating system is version 9.00. As for the multiple boot entries in your grub, it's a function of what you choose to install from the support pack. By default, the PSP will install EVERYTHING.
hpahcisr
andmptlinux
are device drivers for hardware that doesn't even exist in your G7 blade server (hpahcisr is for the low-end B110i SATA RAID controller. mptlinux is for LSI HBA's). When those are selected, the HP installer creates an initial ramdisk and a corresponding kernel entry for each of those because they could potentially be boot controllers/devices for some systems.I trim down the items that get installed by the ProLiant Support Pack. A good guide to follow is the HPSUM guide here.
In short, I edit the bundle description file from the psp tarball. In version 9.00 of the PSP, the file is named
bp000977.xml
Near the bottom of the XML file, I choose which items I want to install from the support pack. For most G6/G7 blades and standalone servers, the following works well. I remove the HP-provided CCISS and HPSA packages since they create unwanted ramdisks and conflict with the kernels I need to use, the HBA's, NIC drivers and fibre-channel utilities. I leave the core health and system management packages in the install manifest.
I save the bundle file and proceed with a silent installation (
./hpsum /s
), but you should be able to run the graphical installation with this reduced package set as well.