Information regarding how to get IP addresses to the blades enclosure bays.

[chuckk281]

The Blades Specialists were discussing how to get IP addresses to the BladeSystem enclosure bays and how this involved DHCP and the EBIPA(Enclosure Bay IP Address) feature in the Onboard Administrator. Here are some words of wisdom from Monty: --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The BladeSystem Onboard Administrator EBIPA feature only works with blades and switches that use the OA management network AND have DHCP configured for their management IP address. It does work on the switches that support using the OA management network and are configured to use that port – example the Cisco 3120 and BLc GEb2 switches can be configured to use the OA management port or an uplink. You also have to configure the switch that is using the OA management network port for DHCP. The intent of EBIPA is to allow the user to configure a management IP address that is based on the bay in the enclosure. For a service event replacing that server blade or interconnect – the management IP address would be set to that EBIPA bay IP address (if the replaced item had DHCP as the default configuration, which is the case on our server blades). The user desiring to set either a server iLO or switch to a static IP address would not enable EBIPA for that bay. Some interconnects – like Virtual Connect Ethernet and FC modules do not have a way to configure the IP address in the module and only support DHCP. Configuring a static IP address for that module can be done using EBIPA for that bay. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Terri Harris]

That is one of the best explanations of the c7000 EBIPA feature I've seen. Well done!

[UK-Blr]

I accept, this is one of the best article. However it would be better if we add how we can reduce the allocated IP's from a IP pool. For ex. If we would like to populate the whole c 7000 enclosure (8 vc modules + 2 OA modules + 16 blades), we need 26 IP's from one VLAN / IP pool. Is there a way where you allocate 2 routable IPs to OA, so that it can communicate with any external monitoring tools etc and all other IPs (VC modules + Blade ILO IPs) in private range 169.xxx.xxx.xxx etc. As this will save usable IPs in an organisation. Uday