Moving Blade servers to different c7000 Chassis and iLO IP addressing

[JL123]

Hi there,

We recently moved one of our fullheight BL685c blade servers from enclosure A to B. The iLO EBIPA addressing for Enclosure A had the VLAN of 10, while Enclosure B had the 12 VLAN. When I plugged the server into the enclosure, we could not access the iLO at all. The EBIPA addressing had the box ticked but it did not pick up the new 12 VLAN.

I fixed it by rebooting the server and then using the dongle for screen/keyboard, and changing the setting to the 12 VLAN and it was fine after that.


My question is: What is the best practice for iLO settings on Blade servers? Should it be set to DHCP or hard set? We are planning a large amount of blade servers to be moved to different enclosures soon so I don't want to get it wrong and have to change a whole bunch of settings manually.

When it is set to 'DHCP', does that mean EBIPA or DHCP from our DHCP server? And if you set DHCP to no, does that hardset the IP? So we would need to change it if we were going to move servers. Currently our build process is to set all iLO's to DHCP no (they get EBIPA when they are first inserted, but obviously if moved they would lose it since hard set).

Does anyone have any idea's?

Cheers.

JL

[Niels Vejrup Pedersen]

Hello,

I always use EBIPA feature configure interconnect and ilo addresses.

Moving servers between enclosures should not be a problem - since EBIPA configures the server when inserted. (i have not had any problems doing that)

Regards

[The Brit]

I would not use DHCP for iLO IP addresses, you should always use EBIPA. In your case, it is more important because you are using different management subnets in your enclosures. EBIPA will ensure that your iLO's are on the appropriate management subnet for the enclosure.

Note also, it may take as long as 20 minutes for the new IP address to propagate down to the blade, especially if it is a "change" of IP address.

Dave.

[Adrian Clint · Accepted solution]

The ILO (AdministrationTab-Network)should should be set to DHCP enabled and you should use EBIPA for best practices.
Unless you want the ILO ip to follow the blade. Then DHCP should should be disabled and the values put in the iLO.
If you disable DHCP then it does not matter if you enable EBIPA.

What seems to happen is as follows:
ILO boots up and if DHCP is enabled in the iLO and EBIPA is enabled for that bay then the OA provides a DHCP IP from the EBPIA settings you have provided. (Must have IP in field and be enabled for that bay).
If iLO DHCP is enabled but there is no EBPIA enabled then the DHCP request is passed out thru the OA port to an external DHCP server.

[JL123]

Thank you for the replies.

I think Adrian has the correct answer I am after. Obviously since DHCP was set to no and we had the IP hardset on the wrong VLAN, we could not get to iLO after the move.

I confirmed this by checking one of our other servers we moved recently , it still has it's old IP from Enclosure A and we moved to Enclosure C (same iLO VLAN so it worked fine), but I just checked the IP and it still had the old A ip address that wasn't in the C EBIPA range.

We have EBIPA in all our enclosures, so I'll ensure we get them all moved to the DHCP on.