Configuring Procurve 3500yl-48G to use/allow IPMI

[mark seklemian]

I'm new to HP Procurve (& somewhat new to switch configuration).

I have a single HP 3500yl-48G, with several servers attached (via a single nic). These servers all have IPMI cards and I need to be able to use IPMI over the same connection as the regular ethernet (i.e. two different subnets. A cisco 2811 supports this by allowing a given vlan to have two gateways, primary and secondary. How can I set up something equivalent on my new 3500yl?
Snippet from 2811 config:

!
interface BVI205
! IPMI gateway
ip address 192.168.205.254 255.255.255.0 secondary
! vlan gateway
ip address 205.100.200.250 255.255.255.0
!

thanks

mark

[Mohammed Faiz · Accepted solution]

You can have multiple subnets on a VLAN but it's really not a nice setup. I'd look at seeing if you can use a VLAN tag on the IPMI interfaces.

To have two gateways on one VLAN just add them in one after the other.

3500# vlan 100 ip address 192.168.205.254 255.255.255.0

3500# vlan 100 ip address 205.100.200.250 255.255.255.0

[Pieter 't Hart]

mark,
>>>
interface BVI205
ip address 205.100.200.250 255.255.255.0
ip address 192.168.205.254 255.255.255.0 secondary
<<<
This has nothing to do with gateways, but you assing an interface two network adresses (primary/secondary)
So this interface can listen (and send) to different subnets.

I have no experience with IPMI cards, but I have some knowledge of HP-iLO and Fujitsu-Siemens managementport.

I'll guess this is a network connection to a mangement processor that uses the same physical network connector as the normal data connector?
Investigate if you can configure this IPMI interface to be vlan-aware and send vlan-tagged packets.

If you configure the switch-ports accordingly (like untagged for data vlan an tagged for IPMI vlan) you'll separate the traffic on different vlan's instead of using single vlan with multiple subnets (multinet).
Ofcourse you also need to configure routing if you need those vlan's to communicate.

Pieter

[mark seklemian]

THANKS Pieter,

You are correct, IPMI provides a management network and uses the same physical server port as the data.

Vlan tagging seems to make sense - I'm checking to see what it takes to get IPMI to be vlan aware. I have already tried to setup a separate vlan for IPMI and tag that vlan to the data vlan (port-by-port). I assigned the "secondary" ip address to the IPMI vlan. This did not work - but it may be that I have not setup the IPMI correctly. I'll do some more checking there.

thanks again.

Anybody have experience setting IPMI to be vlan aware?

[Pieter 't Hart]

what brand servers/ipmi-cards do you use?

here is some doc from Dell
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/smdrac3/idrac/idrac10mono/en/ug/html/racugc4.htm
look at the section:
Configuring the Network and IPMI LAN Settings, table 4.6.