Onboard Administrator (OA) XML documentation

[chuckk281]

Jon had a customer question regarding the Onboard Administrator:

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I have a customer that is trying to automate the collection of data from our blade enclosures and found that the Onboard Administrators will respond to a browser request by emitting a large chunk of XML.  He is asking for documentation on being able to do this.  I provided him the CLI user guide and he said that is not what he is looking to do, he does not what to SSL with structured scripts because if he makes firmware changes it requires him to go back and make changes to the script.  I have not seen any documentation that explains how to use the XML feature of the OA on the blades, has anyone had this request and do we have a documents that may help explain what the customer is requesting?

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Monty got involved:

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I believe you are asking about the OA XML Reply.

We don’t document this feature, nor the format of the data, as we don’t intend to support it as a customer user interface.

The primary user of that data is HP System Insight Manager as indicated on the OA GUI help screen on the page with that setting.

This query is available from any OA that has enabled the XML Reply setting using http://<OA_IP_address>/xmldata?item=all

You can see this in action using the OA GUI by navigating to Enclosure Settings | Network Access | Protocols and selecting “view” next to Enable XML Reply – if XML Reply is enabled.

We feel that OA XML Reply is not as useful as performing individual CLI commands, if the user is trying to automate data collection.  It does not provide as much information as the CLI “show all” command, nor any ability to control or change any setting.  However, the XML Reply might contain all the data the customer is wishing to collect.

You will find that OA firmware changes that add new features will also change the data sent with the XML reply, so using XML reply will not solve that issue.  If the customer wants to code an XML parser to extract data from the OA XML Reply – that should be possible, but is not something that we document or support.

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Scott also provided great input:

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That link Monty gave you will get your customer off to the races.  If your customer knows how to use tools like XQuery and XSLT, they can do all sorts of things.  Both are turing-complete and can give the customer a great deal of querying power.

Having written an ascii parser of the show all (bladefw.jar), I can understand why your customer would like to harness the XML responses.  Being able to use the previously mentioned tools (XQuery/XSLT) make for a far superior result.  However, it is not necessary to understand the format of this data ahead of time; XML (unlike other "tagged" languages like HTML) is well-formed by definition and it wouldn't take someone handy with these tools too long to know exactly what they're looking at.  The only problem is what Monty referred to, ie the lack of division support for their XML responses.  I suppose they could change the format of the XML responses in a future release and break the parser. 

I'm looking forward to playing with the XML responses myself a little later in the year, but too snowed-under right now for this.  I'd like to kick bladefw.jar to the curb and work on something fancier over the holidays.

With the link Monty sent, you could refer your customer to XML In a Nutshell (O'Reilly) and they could have XQuery/XSLT up and running pretty quick.

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And Ken also answered the question:

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https://<OA>/xmldata?item=all is the syntax used by SIM to get the inventory data from the OA, and build the rack view.  The XML is for inquiry only as far as I know.  So this can’t be used to script enclosure configuration.

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Any other comments or suggestions?

[zagpoint]

Thanks for the great insight! I am also looking around to see if I can somehow extract the rack overview image. I am trying to create an inventroy of all my HP enclosures and provide a quick summary of the blade layout in the chassis. The fact the my insight manager has all the information, including the overview image, makes me believe that I can parse the XML output and grab the image from there. 

How do I extract the overview image? The only thing I seem to find on the /xmldata?item=all page is this image:

'<IMAGE_URL>/cgi-bin/getLCDImage?oaSessionKey=</IMAGE_URL>'

Where are all the other images?

[Casper42]

The XMLDATA page is an XML dump of the configuration of the enclosure and has nothing to do with individual pictures.

The OA has all those and SIM has all those and they are using things like the Model details to select the proper picture.
The OA Web code masks this very well by using some Java Script and I am not seeing an easy way to find all the pics. SIM might be easier.
But you could also just download the Blade Visio objects over at visiocafe and then save off the various components you need as jpg or similar.

The Image URL you found in the config output is the Image being used as a custom background for the tiny LCD screen on the front of the c7000. Has nothing to do with the Overview Picture.

[zagpoint]

By loading this page:

'http://OA-IP/xmldata?item=all'

I can see that the blade overview image is dynamically generated based on what is in the chassis. Here are the relevant XML dump:

...

<DIM>...</DIM>

<BLADES>

<BAYS>

<BAY NAME="1">

<SIDE>FRONT</SIDE>

<mmHeight>181</mmHeight>

<mmWidth>56</mmWidth>

<mmDepth>480</mmDepth>

<mmXOffset>0</mmXOffset>

<mmYOffset>7</mmYOffset>

</BAY>

<BAY NAME="2">

<SIDE>FRONT</SIDE>

<mmHeight>181</mmHeight>

<mmWidth>56</mmWidth>

<mmDepth>480</mmDepth>

<mmXOffset>56</mmXOffset>

<mmYOffset>7</mmYOffset>

</BAY>

<BAY NAME="3">

<SIDE>FRONT</SIDE>

<mmHeight>181</mmHeight>

<mmWidth>56</mmWidth>

<mmDepth>480</mmDepth>

<mmXOffset>112</mmXOffset>

<mmYOffset>7</mmYOffset>

</BAY>

<BAY NAME="4">

<SIDE>FRONT</SIDE>

<mmHeight>181</mmHeight>

<mmWidth>56</mmWidth>

<mmDepth>480</mmDepth>

<mmXOffset>168</mmXOffset>

<mmYOffset>7</mmYOffset>

</BAY>

<BAY NAME="5">

<SIDE>FRONT</SIDE>

<mmHeight>181</mmHeight>

<mmWidth>56</mmWidth>

<mmDepth>480</mmDepth>

<mmXOffset>224</mmXOffset>

<mmYOffset>7</mmYOffset>

</BAY>

<BAY NAME="6">

<SIDE>FRONT</SIDE>

<mmHeight>181</mmHeight>

<mmWidth>56</mmWidth>

<mmDepth>480</mmDepth>

<mmXOffset>280</mmXOffset>

<mmYOffset>7</mmYOffset>

</BAY>

...

How do I construct the image from this?

[Casper42]

I'm not a web developer :P

[MartinHbsk]

Hello folks,

any advice where could I get mentioned bladeFW.jar tool for parsing the "show all" output from c7000?

Thanks a lot!