ESXi patching and upgrade is the integral part of VMware admins Job. ESXi patching and upgrade is to ensure that we are in the latest version to make use of the new features and also to mitigate any vulnerabilities or bug fixes. As similar to the ESXi upgrade, it is also an important task to keep the hardware firmware and drivers up-to-date to avoid hardware related issues. we should always ensure to include the firmware and driver updates as part of ESXi patching and maintenance window to keep healthier and issue free vSphere environment. Even with a lot of HCI and vSAN are dominating the market, firmware and driver upgrades are must comply with the vSAN VCG (VMware Compatibility Guide). I noticed a few issues when updating the firmware for my DELL ESXi hosts. My firmware update task failed a few times with the error “RED014: Job for this device is already present”. In this article, I will explain you the procedure to fix this issue during DELL firmware upgrades.

I received the same error “RED014: Job for this device is already present” while performing DELL Firmware upgrade using DELL OpenManage and also I did try to upgrade the firmware using iDRAC system update. I received the same error in both the method. When you have problem with DELL Lifecycle Controller jobs you can delete all the jobs and retry the upgrade. In this case, even after deleting the jobs in iDRAC, firmware upgrade job was failing. We have another way to forcefully delete the lifecycle controller jobs.

FIX – RED014: Job for this device is already present

In this example, I have tried to upgrade the firmware for “Backplane”.Below is the error “RED014: Job for this device is already present”. I did delete the jobs multiple times and retried but it didn’t help me here.

To clear and remove the error you must clear the job queue via Secure Shell (SSH). To do this you must use a Secure Shell (SSH) client like puttyEnter the IP of the affected iDRAC and login with admin credentials. Run the below command

racadm jobqueue delete -i JID_CLEARALL_FORCE

Once the job queue is cleared, Please “Reset the iDRAC” and  wait for a few minutes to leave the iDRAC login

Once the JOB queue is cleared and iDRAC is reset, I retried the firmware upgrade for the same server for Backplane. This time it went through the upgrade and server rebooted to complete the firmware upgrade on the server.

I know this is a simple post but it saves a lot of your time and effort to fix this issue quickly to move forward with your maintenance schedule. I hope this is informative for you. Thanks for Reading!!. Be social and share it in social media, if you feel worth sharing it.