C7000-SET Enclosure Base IP Address (EBIPA) question

[chuckk281]

Peter was looking to help a customer:

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Would you please help me answer my customer question ( they have C7000 and BL495, OA 3.55, VC 3.51, iLO2 2.09)

Just a quick question regarding Blade time.

It appear that our Chassis’ are getting the correct time from the NTP server, but the blades to not seem to be sync’ed to the Chassis.

Is there a way this can be done or does the the server not have this function?

I checked the OA CLI reference guide and  found that there is not option with SET EBIPA SERVER for NTP unlike SET EBIPA INTERCONNECT  is there any other way to do this?!!

Command:

SET EBIPA SERVER { <IP address> <netmask> } | { NETMASK <netmask> } | { GATEWAY

<gateway> } | { DOMAIN <domain> } [ ALL | <bay number> [{- | ,} <bay number>]

SET EBIPA INTERCONNECT { <IP address> <netmask> } | { NETMASK <netmask> }

| { GATEWAY <gateway> } | { DOMAIN <domain> } | { NTP PRIMARY | SECONDARY

<IP address> } [ ALL | <bay number> [{- | ,} <bay number>]

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The responses:

From Dan: 

http://bizsupport1.austin.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&taskId=120&prodSeriesId=397989&prodTypeId=18964&objectID=c01796011

iLO uses System Time which is maintained across reboots by the BIOS clock.

When you adjust the time in the OS, assuming the iLO driver is in place it should automatically update the iLO’s time as well.

As such we don’t have a EBIPA setting for NTP since there is no NTP in iLO.

I know Windows and VMware support NTP right out of the box, and I would assume most flavors of Linux do as well.

With Windows, once a server joins a domain, it generally synchs its time to the domain.

And input from Jim:

This will sync with the Windows server time configuration and any Linux server configured to use local time as Dan stated – but doesn’t match a Linux server configured with UTC.

Reply from Jeroen:

There is only a bit of confusion now with Gen8 blades as they have now NTP servers and this can be set ONLY in the iLO GUI; although many people would think that we can set NTP with OA to the blades that is incorrect; the confusing message about this at EBIPA is removed in OA FW 3.60 or higher. You can still set NTP at the Interconnect EBIPA settings.

For Gen8 you can only set the iLO NTP via the GUI or a XML script; personally I would like to see that back into the EBIPA settings for the blades so I don’t need to set that via XML to all 16 blades or via iLO GUI but that is not up to me.

And of course this iLO NTP time is not synchronized back to the Blade or OS; its only used by iLO.

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Any other comments or questions?