Long Server Boot Up Time

[SAN J]

We had a strange issue that I'm hoping someone might know the cause for it. We did a tech refresh for a customer from 4X to 7X for CM(7.1.3), Unity Connection, ER ,and UCCX. All IBM servers (mix of 7835 and 7845 class) with RSA turned on. Servers were all configured in our lab and tested without issues. However, when we moved to customer site, all the Linux platform servers took more than 20 minutes to boot up. The only ones that came up normal were the windows boxes (UCCX). Looking at the console, it gets stuck on "UEIF Start Up" but eventually boots up fine after a long time. We tried rebooting but got the same results. None of this happened during the several reboots we did in the lab so not sure what could be impacting this. Anyhow, just wondering if anyone's run into this.

[Christos Georgiadis · Accepted solution]

Hi there,

I understand you have long boot times on your cucm 7.1.3 right after the UEFI start up sequence.

First of all UEFI is considered the next generation of BIOS. (It was about time if you ask me )

So that means that it is loaded after the server is powered on and this has nothing to do with callmanager itself, or the OS for that matter.

You can check a few things about UEFI if you are interested here

http://www.uefi.org/about/

From my research I see that this is known with IBM servers.

What happens is that during boot time UEFI performs some checks to see if the all the system components are compatible to run with it. If not the system reverts in the legacy code and the OS boots up using the legacy code. Apparently these checks take a lot of time to complete hence the delay you are experiencing.

The only thing I can suggest at this point is to install the latest Cisco Firmware Update CD (FWUCD) which can be found here for MCS-7845-I3

http://www.cisco.com/cisco/software/release.html?mdfid=282821927&flowid=6693&softwareid=283046743&release=3.5(1)&rellifecycle=&relind=AVAILABLE&reltype=latest

This one was released in 1 Oct 2010 so it is quite recent. You can check the models of the servers you have and download the appropriate FWUCD

Make sure you read the instructions that come with it, should you decide to upgrade the firmware.

Hope this helps,

Christos

PS: Yes I have seen that other people experience this as well

[SAN J]

Christos,

Looks like the firmaware update did do the trick. Many thanks for the help...