I’ve been tearing my hear out over the last couple of days trying to solve a problem that appeared after I upgraded a few of my HP c-class enclosures to the 3.00 version of the HP Virtual Connect firmware.

The problem was whenever viewing a server profile or a defined network, the Flex UI would just sit there with a box entitled “Loading” that said “Please wait…” with a neverending progress bar. One of those progress bars that just is infinite and pretty worthless. If you’re going to include a progress bar in your display, it should actually indicate the progress of the current action and stop at some point. But this one just sat there all animated and infinite.

I power cycled one and then both VC Ethernet modules. I tried restoring a backup of the config that I just made. I power cycled the entire enclosure. Nothing would solve this problem for me. Right before I was about to call HP, I visited the HP 1/10GB Virtual Connect Ethernet Module download page and was pleasantly surprised (ecstatic really) to see that version 3.01 had been released (with no sign of 3.00 even having ever existed) and one of the purported fixes was for the very issue I was experiencing!

I quickly downloaded the firmware and applied it to the two enclosures where I had previously applied the 3.00 version. Problem solved!

Moral of the story: check for newer firmware before trying anything else. My problem was that 3.00 had come out not too long ago and I knew that VirtualConnect firmware is not updated too often so I subconsciously assumed there wouldn’t be anything new.