HP SIM/IRS, BL460c servers, HPC: one adapter public, one private: Private IP becomes Name

[macartm]

Hi,

I have had the most frustrating several days trying to get HP IRS to do what I want.

Scenario is an HPC cluster full of BL460c Gen8 blades. Two adapters are connected through at the back to Procurves. One is the Enterprise network, and it has hostnames defined, and publically accessible IP addresses. 

The other is the Application network, which just connects between the head node and the blades, and isn't publically accessible.

So let's take a real life example, although the names have been changed.

I have compute node NODE17. Its public IP is 172.26.22.86; and if you do an nslookup on NODE17.domain.name.com, you get back the IP 172.26.22.86. And there's also a corresponding PTR record going the other way to resolve 172.26.22.86 to the name.

NODE17 has an iLO which is on 172.26.18.86 ... We tried to keep the last octet the same.

I add the iLO. Everything initially seems fine after Discover Device ... the blade shows up as NODE17.

A short while later, it finds the private IP, and NODE17 becomes 192.168.0.47.

And there is no way to change it, or even to add an alias, that I can find.

I even tried changing it in the database (UPDATE oos set nm='NODE17' where nm='192.168.0.47').

And that works for a bit - until discovery runs again. And then it's overwritten again with the IP address.

How do I get these systems to have meaningful names (and IP addresses)?

Surely my setup is not so bizarre. Other people with HPC clusters must have seen this problem, after all. How do you do it? And how do I get those meaningful names to persist after a discovery?

- Is there some way, for instance, to tell it 'don't take names from adapters which begin with 192.168.' ?

- Is it something to do with DNS settings on the iLO? After all, the iLO discovers the server. Maybe it needs to be able to resolve that address to something meaningful.

- Is IRS just plain incapable of doing this? In which case, how do we get it fixed?

I hope there is a way...

[macartm]

I forgot to mention, the IRS version is 7.3.0.0050. However, please do not just say 'upgrade to latest version' unless you can confirm that upgrading to the latest version (and this one is not very old) would actually solve the problem in any manner.

[Andrew_Haak]

If you select the server and go to the Tools & Links tab and click on the Edit System Properties you can select the Primary IP and select the option Prevent the Discovery process from changing the systems primary IP adres.

The strange thing however is why does the discovery change the primary to the other interface ?

Does this help or should we look at why this happens ?