Blades, racks and enclosures

[Mark de Manbey_1]

I'm sure that I'm just being dense, but I can't figure out how to manage our HP BL 20 blades, and the associated rack and enclosures.

SIM v 5 seems to find all the hardware. But it treats them all as seperate. Shouldn't I be able to see the blades sitting happily in the rack diagram? All I get is a quesion mark... The blades are running VMWare, ESX Server 2.5.2, and I believe that they all that the correct agents on them.

[Aravindh Rajaram]

Make sure that you have the Rack infrastructure agents as part of the "Active agents" list (You can do it in Control Panel->HP Management Agents)and also ensure that the SNMP settings are made correctly.

[Mark de Manbey_1]

Thanks for that. Neither the Clustering Information nor the Rack Information agents were installed. They were listed, but I needed to put them in the added column. Gonna test this and see where we go.

Cheers.

[Aravindh Rajaram]

And do remember that you need to run the Identification task in SIM after activating the agents for SIM to associate the server to the Enclosure/Rack.

[Mark de Manbey_1]

Yep, didn't know that either!

Thanks again.

[Mark de Manbey_1]

Just tried to identify the blade rack and enclosures, along with some other stuff, and it skips all the systems I want to identify... Any ideas why?

[Ferry Steenvoorde]

There is a sort of timer that does not allow you to identify/data_collect a system within about 15 or 30 minutes. After that you can give it another try.

[Mark de Manbey_1]

Tried a few times now, the rack and enclosures are all saying HW Unknown, and are skipped when I perform an "identify system".

Just tried a data collect and got -

"Data collection was skipped for this system because the system is suspended or inaccessible."

Any ideas about that? All the systems are online.

[Ferry Steenvoorde]

Just to get things right:

1. install HPSIM ServicePack3 on your HPSIM-server. This includes some updated MIBS that are better equipped to identify anything that's inside your server racks and enclosures. This includes your Power Supply Units, a feature that did not always work on HPSIM5 without servicepack.
HPSIM SP3 can be installed separately; you do not have to reinstall the entire HPSIM software.

2. Connect to the ILO-board of the leftmost blade server in an enclosure. Enter the following settings in Administration, SNMP/Insight Manager settings:
-Enable iLO SNMP Alerts: No
-Forward Insight manager SNMP Alerts: No
-Enable SNMP Pass-Thru: Yes
-Enable p-Class Alert Forwarding: Yes
-Data Return: Enabled
Apply Settings

Verify this for every enclosure in the racks. The iLO-boards of every leftmost server in an enclosure manages the Enclosure Management Module.
Also verify that the Management Modules inside a rack are linked.

3. Install the latest Support Pack on the blade servers. Reboot when finished. This should automatically include all kinds of agents that are required for monitoring the hardware.

4. Make sure both the iLO-board IP-addresses and the blade server IP-addresses are included in the ranges for Automatic Discovery.

5. Run Automatic Discovery.

When Automatic Discovery has finished, all blade servers should appear in the Rack Views.
If not, you might need to delete all "separate" blade servers and run Discovery again.

Other requirements (correct SNMP community, IP-ports on routers etcetera) seem to be in place, otherwise you would not even have seen the blade servers as separate hardware.

[Mark de Manbey_1]

Thanks for that really informative response, Ferry.

Still having problems, despite following those steps. The left most blade in the rack is running windows Server 2003, and is showing up in the CMC as an icon in the blade encloser itself - this is a GOOD thing, and is what I would expect to see. It's iLo firmware is 1.82. However, I also have 4 ESX 2.5.2 servers in the same blade enclosure, and these are still not showing up. They have iLo firmware of 1.7... will this make any difference? When I hover over the image of the power enclosure in the CMC (both enclosures are full of question marks), a tool tip tells me that to make use of this feature I need to upgrade the iLo to verson 1.8. Is this for the ESX iLo's???

Everything else seems to be fine. This is really frustrating, partly because the ESX blades are running Linux which I don't really understand.

Any further help much appreciated, guys.

[Ferry Steenvoorde]

Reading the specs for iLO firmware 1.82 and 1.80, I read in the 1.80 fixes:
"Issue that prevented the iLO firmware from maintaining a user defined static IP address for Blade Servers".

Furthermore, HP recommends using firmware version 1.82. Any lower version shows an Orange status in Version Control Agent.

On the other hand, I'm not sure whether HPSIM uses information from the iLO-board, from the Operating System, or both together, to fill in the rack topology.
If it is using only the information from the iLO-board, you might fix your issue with the iLO-firmware update.
If it is using any Operating System info, there should be some Linux Support Pack installed on ESX itself. I do not know whether that is possible at all.

The virtual servers running in ESX should be unrelated to the physical hardware they are running on.

[COOPERCAV]

Are the enclosures and PMM's on firmware version 2.20? Also, have you installed a recently BIOS firmware on all the blades? Just a thought.

[Mark de Manbey_1]

Yeah, all enclosures upgraded to 2.2. Still showing this (see attached). One blade running 2003 Server is visible, but nothing else is...

[Mark de Manbey_1]

Sorry, mis-print. THe enclosures are actually on 2.3.