Testing C-Class Blades???

[Koopa]

I'm trying to find a easy way of running diags on newly built C-Class blades. We don't have a test rig on this site, so I can't test them before the installed in new live racks. Ideally I would like an automated smart start diags run, that doesn't require me to type anything. So does anyone know how i can install smart start on a USB key and run diags without me tpying anything. So i can literally power the blade off, insert the USB key which runs diags. Then hopefully it could record the info in a text doc with a serial number as the name. I then reboot the blade and install the USB key in the next blade and repeat. or can anyone think of a better way of running diags on multiple blades?

[William E Howard]

I would recommend looking into using RDP. Depending on whether or not you bought Insight Control with your C-Class Enclosure, you may already have a license for it.

When RDP launches a WinPE instance on a blade that has PXE booted, it will map a drive back to the RDP Server. You can also script setting up other drive mappings, so you can have a place to put the results of the diagnostics.

You can use scripting for alot of your testing, and for more advanced things you can have the scripts copy down the executable you want to use for testing.

You can easily tell an entire enclosure of C-Class blades to PXE boot, and as soon as they do they will appear in RDP. You then just drag your Diagnostics job onto those machines, and it will run.

[Koopa]

I forgot to mention that we wont have access to networks as they are managed by another department. So I can't do RDP either.

[William E Howard]

Without RDP, then I guess using a USB thumb drive would work. However, you might want to look at a hard drive based system. Since the blades have hot swap hard drives, it would be just as easy to have a 'diag' hard drive that you can slap into a machine, then boot and have it run advanced diagnostics on run.

You can also use a CD/DVD based system using iLO. Granted, you won't be able to write to a txt file, but maybe you can script it to email them or something. That would probably be your best bet. You simply setup an ISO file of your diagnostics, then you go one by one thru your blades and connect the virtual media to the ISO file.

Not quite sure how not being in charge of networks blocks you from using RDP or another deployment software for this, but I assume you know your situation.

[Koopa]

I like the disk idea. Do you know how to make it completely automated. Because as you say I can reboot blades. Then after I've installed 20 blades. I can install in the disk in another server in the office and then check the report.

[William E Howard]

Easiest way would be install you favorite flavor of Linux or Windows on one of the C-class. In the startup setup a single master diag script that will spawn each test.

I don't remember off the top of my head how to have a script look up the Serial Number for the host system, but that would be your best bet for logging the diagnostics.

Once you have everything the way you want it, just pop the hard drive out and move on to the next box.

Since everything on the C-class is hot swap, if you setup the OS on one of the C-class, you can move that drive to any other blade and they will have no problems booting off of it.