HP RDP with Blade Technology

[Five Tenets]

I am new to HP RDP.

I have a few questions:

1) Can RDP function in an environment with no DHCP Server on the LAN? We have a c7000 Enclosure with 2 BL860cs and 1 BL460c.

2) Is RDP designed for nationwide functionality? Meaning if I want to install or backup a site in Montana does communication have to go back to our central Server in Virginia or is there anyway to have it all run locally in Montana?

3) What advatages or disadvatages does RDP have over Microsoft WAIK or ImageX?

4) What components and setup are needed to setup RDP?

5) Once RDP is setup what are the options to install or backup that site in Montana?

6) Is it possible to backup Oracle RAC or if I use ImageX to capture a master image do I have to uninstall and reinstall Oracle RAC with the site specific config?

Thanks!

[Adrian Clint]

Hi Five!!!! (hand slap)

RDP is actually Symantec/Altiris Deployment Solution using Microsoft WAIK and the HP Smartstart scripting toolkit to deploy servers to HP best practices.

Question - are you talking about using RDP for imaging servers or doing scripted builds or both?

1) You can boot from media or a boot partition on a server and have a fixed IP address configured for each server as part of the boot process. This is not RDP standard - you need an Altiris Consultant to help configure.

2) Yes, you can have a single RDP management console that is configured to use local datastores for images and scripted installs and config captures... again non HP standard but can be configure by a Deployment Solution consultant. A local site can have its own DHCP scope.

3) Advantage is that RDP uses WAIK but then deploys the HP agents and drivers as part of the full task. I've used ImageX so cant comment.

4) DHCP helps. Rest depends on do you want it just to deploy OS or to use to manage and deploy servers ongoing.

5) Nothing specific I can think of due to question not specific enough - what do you actually want to achieve or mean?

6) Is it possible to backup Oracle RAC or if I use ImageX to capture a master image do I have to uninstall and reinstall Oracle RAC with the site specific config?
Do you want to backup oracle or do you want to replicate it? If its a straight backup and the recover by re-imaging a new server - then RDP/ImageX can probably do same as each other. If you are replicating then the probems are the same for either product. What you could script with RDP is an OS image deployment for the Base OS and then a scripted install of Oracle - this could be sent out to different servers.

Very much depends on how many servers you want to do this on and how often.

Thanks!

[Five Tenets]

Hi Adrian! Yes Hi Five back

Thanks for your advice so far and it does help.

A little more specific of my problem is as follows.

I would like to image a Master Blade and roll this image out to the field for disaster recovery purposes.

No need to deploy or backup. Systems are running and I just need to have a plan of action in case a system dies or I need to rebuild a server that becomes corrupt.

I have done this already using WAIK and it works fine; but, the post WAIK procedure is several hours because of our setup.

We have 2 BL860cs running MS Cluster and Oracle RAC across the 2 nodes inside a c7000 Enclosure.

From my sources at Oracle it is impossible to do what I want and RAC has to be uninstalled and reinstalled at the site with that site's network config.

So, after I upload and run my WAIK image MS Cluster and Oracle RAC take several hours which is why HP RDP was brought up.

Will RDP do what I want any better?

I like that MS WAIK requires to backend setup and requires to central server, etc. I just image and push it out.

I'm nervous of reimaging a site in Montana using RDP if it has to talk back to our RDP central server on the east coast.

Again, we don't have DHCP running at any of our sites.

Any ideas? What would you recommened?

Thanks!
FT