Can't get GbE2c bootp relay to work

[Chris_OC]

Hello there,

I'm trying to configure a brand new c7000 enclosure with 4 BL680c blades and 2 GbE2c switches in it. I have configured all iLO interfaces using the Onboard Administrator wizard to 10.0.0.0/24 and I can reach all systems by connecting through the OA ilO port.

I have been able to boot one blade using PXE by connecting a laptop with DHCP & NFS servers to the management VLAN 1.

Now what I would like to do is to have the blades boot with PXE from my laptop connected on iLO, in order to simplify management. Thus I could keep all iLO access and virtual consoles, while controlling the boot process for each blade.

So I have tried to configure the system as follows:

Switch 1 VLAN 1 = 192.168.222.1

Switch 1 ILO = 10.0.0.64

OA 1 ILO = 10.0.0.1

DHCP server = 10.0.0.253

and have activated BOOTP relay to 10.0.0.253. The DHCP server is ready to serve addresses in the 192.168.222.0/24 range but never receives any request. Monitoring with tcpdump shows no packet on ports 67 or 68.

I expected blade 1 to broadcast a DHCP request on VLAN 1, which would then be picked up by interface 192.168.222.1 and forwarded to the DHCP server, however this doesn't seem to happen.

Can someone see what I'm doing wrong here?

Thanks for your help,

Chris

[Matti_Kurkela]

The network traffic of the OA and the iLOs goes through the physical network interface of the active OA module.

The network traffic of the blade NICs goes through the GBE2c switches, and out through the uplink port(s) of the switch module(s).

Are these two connected together in any way outside the enclosure? More specifically, is there a router (or similar Layer-3 device) anywhere that would pass traffic between 10.0.0.0/24 and 192.168.222.0/24?

I don't know the feature list of the GbE2c switches by heart, but I would not expect them to have the capability for routing, and even if it had, I *definitely* would not expect the routing functionality to be enabled by default.

[Chris_OC]

Hi Matti,

thanks a lot for your answer.

---

Are these two connected together in any way outside the enclosure? More specifically, is there a router (or similar Layer-3 device) anywhere that would pass traffic between 10.0.0.0/24 and 192.168.222.0/24?

No, they're not connected outside the enclosure. However the GbE2c switch in its default configuration has access to both VLANs, VLAN 4095 (iLO) on port 19 and VLAN 1 (Management) on all other ports. Also the IP roiuting table shows both 10.0.0.0/24 and 192.168.222.0/24 subnets directly connected.

---

I don't know the feature list of the GbE2c switches by heart, but I would not expect them to have the capability for routing, and even if it had, I *definitely* would not expect the routing functionality to be enabled by default.

---

In fact the GbE2c L2/3 switch that we are using is capable of doing IP routing, even though as you noted the feature is not enabled by default. However I definitly did enable IP routing in the configuration. But indeed I did not define a default router, since supposedly the topology didn't require one. May this be the cause of the problem? I'll check out this and let you know.

Thanks a lot for your help,

Chris