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How can you determine the generation of a blade? Is it a G5 or G6 or whatever?

 
chuckk281
Trusted Contributor

How can you determine the generation of a blade? Is it a G5 or G6 or whatever?

Nick had a customer that wanted to know:

 

Customer needs to quickly identify whether a server is G6 in their environment.

 

David had an answer:

 

Serial number is an SMBIOS field, and so is the Model.  Rather than get the serial number and then try and decode that to a generation (which may or not be possible; when we went to the 10-digit serial number they were no longer guaranteed to be unique; a GUID now has to be constructed with both Product ID and Serial Number).

 

Since it’s in SMBIOS, you can retrieve it even without having any of our agents or whatnot loaded.  For example, the WMIC command line utility for WMI lets you do:

 

wmic computersystem get model

 

…which will respond with

 

Model ProLiant DL360 G5

 

…or whatnot.  In Linux, parsing ‘dmidecode’ should give you what you want.  It even works on the ESX service console:

 

[root@prodesx1 root]# dmidecode | grep ProLiant

                Product Name: ProLiant BL460c G1

 

ESXi might be a little trickier since there’s no service console, because you might have to stand off-platform and get the info from WBEM over the wire.

 

If all the iLOs are connected and you know their IP addresses you could query them all without needing the authenticate with

 

http://[iLO IP Address]/xmldata?item=all

 

which will respond something like:

 

<?xml version="1.0" ?>

- <RIMP>

- <HSI>

  <SBSN>MXQ80700ZY</SBSN>

  <SPN>ProLiant BL680c G5</SPN>

  <UUID>449316MXQ80700ZY</UUID>

  <SP>1</SP>

  <cUUID>33393434-3631-584D-5138-303730305A59</cUUID>

- <VIRTUAL>

  <STATE>Active</STATE>

- <VID>

  <BSN>VCX0000003</BSN>

  <cUUID>3D217192-2AF8-4404-93AE-5229FE94126F</cUUID>

  </VID>

  </VIRTUAL>

  </HSI>

- <MP>

  <ST>1</ST>

  <PN>Integrated Lights-Out 2 (iLO 2)</PN>

  <FWRI>1.70</FWRI>

  <BBLK>3; Jul 11 2006</BBLK>

  <HWRI>ASIC: 7</HWRI>

  <SN>ILOMXQ80700ZY</SN>

  <UUID>ILO449316MXQ80700ZY</UUID>

  <IPM>1</IPM>

  <SSO>1</SSO>

  </MP>

  </RIMP>

 

…but it also seems that all of this could have been avoided if they simply had HP SIM set up.  It would all be in the database.

 

Hey, even if they don’t have a currently working HP SIM, it actually could be accomplished very quickly with a new setup.  Since the data can be collected via WMI or WBEM, even if our agents/providers aren’t there, they should be able to do a quick discovery of their systems and Initial Data Collection will pull the data back for them.  (one caveat is that the OpenPegasus CIMOM layer isn’t a default install on most Linuxes like RHEL or SLES, so there may not be anything for HP SIM to talk to then.  Both ESX and ESXi have CIMOMs now be default).