Emulex OCe10102-FX firmware upgrades

If for some reason you ever find yourself in the undoubtedly very common situation where you need to update a very old firmware/boot code version on some Emulex 10g OCe10102-FX cards that you just received and they're installed in an ESXi box, have I got some delightful news for you!

Maybe not delightful.  But, since I couldn't find any references to this anywhere, I thought I'd share.

Here are what I considered my options to accomplish the task at hand:

Option 1: So there's this Emulex OneConnect vCenter plugin that's a bit weird but I expect gets the job done in better cirumstances - it actually requires (for lack of a better term) a proxy Windows server that runs a service that does all the heavy lifting (I just ended up installing it on my vCenter server for my own sanity).  Fortunately, it has an interface to update the firmware.  Unfortunately, attempting to update the firmware via that interface just resulted in a "job" that sat out there forever and did nothing until I restarted the (Windows) service.

Option 2: There are some fine instructions here that give a very straightforward look in to creating a WinPE boot disk with the Emulex offline utilities and Windows AIK that can be used for updating firmware.  However, when I went to use my disk, my cards were all identified by the Emulex drivers as OCe10100 cards and they wouldn't update the firmware due to it being for a different adapter type.

Option 3: A loatheful option, but the one I started chasing - build up a Windows or Linux server and plug as many cards in to it as possible and just bulk update them using the normal Emulex tools.  This isn't terribly helpful if you don't have a spare server lying around or if you're, I don't know, in any sort of hurry, but I couldn't figure out any other way of pulling this off.

On a whim I shot an email over to Emulex's technical support telling them about the misidentified cards in a WinPE environment and they responded with this:

This is an indication that the firmware on the adapter is fairly old. To work around is a bootable ISO image that will install the newer firmware version into the adapter.

Due to release policy inside Emulex, I will need to request the ISO be sent to you. You will receive an email from another Emulex employee to get the ISO.

Oh, I get it.  My firmware is too old to update to a newer version.

In any event, no ISO yet and my Windows box will be plugging away at the cards in the morning if it's able, but there it is.  If anyone's curious, the current firmware on most of these cards is 2.703.269.30.  Seeing as the current version I downloaded is 4.0.360.3, I suppose I can see how issues might arise.

Edit: The provided ISO from Emulex worked dandily!