Simplified Management with Altiris Deployment Solution for Dell Servers
You think you know Dell deployment? Learn a few new moves.
Since its first inception in June 2004, Altiris Deployment Solution for Dell Servers has been the tool of choice for simple drag and drop Dell PowerEdge bare metal provisioning and on-going server management.
Just a few of the capabilities include the remote deployment of popular software titles such as ESX Server, SQL Server, Oracle, OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA), applying hardware updates, executing pre-OS and post-OS scripts, etc. By the time this article is published, the Altiris Business Unit of Symantec will have released 7 versions of this award winning product, excluding service packs and hotfixes, with the current version being 3.0 SP1. This article will discuss an exclusive offering made available through the Dell Partnership with the PowerEdge M600 Series (Dell's 10th Generation Blade Servers), describe some of the latest face lifts this product has undergone since its last major release, and discuss changes regarding rip and replace support for the M1000e modular chassis (Dell's 10th Generation Blade Server Chassis).
Table of Contents
A New Way to Obtain the Product
Latest Features
- Updated Hardware and Automation Environment Support
- New Configuration Wizard
- Independent PXE Image Files
- Job Builder
- Rule Based RAID Provisioning
- Pre-OS Hardware Updating
- Common UPIMG.BIN file for Dell Diagnostic Partition
- Out of Band Power Control
- Dell OEM Extensions in Boot Disk Creator
M1000e Support
For More Information
A New Way to Obtain the Product
Traditionally, Altiris has made the Deployment Solution for Dell Servers product available through the download page of the Altiris.com website and it is still offered there today. Recently, however, Dell has started to OEM the product with every blade server they ship. Contained on a DVD included in the box are all the bits necessary to install the Altiris Deployment Solution for Dell Servers product. This product includes both the standard Altiris Deployment Solution software as well as a Dell-specific add-on for server management. This Dell add-on is what fully integrates with the Dell OpenManage Tool Kit (DTK) thereby enabling the bare metal provisioning of Dell hardware including automated configuration and updating of the BIOS, BMC, DRAC, and RAID components. Also contained on the DVD is product documentation and a quick start video that walks through installation and configuration options.
Customers are encouraged to review the release notes for any late breaking technical caveats that may be helpful for setting up the product in your environment. On the back of the DVD sleeve is a registration code that administrators will use at our licensing portal (i.e., www.altiris.com/LMP) to retrieve their license(s) for use during the installation of the product.
Latest Features
We've made some significant changes to the Dell Deployment product since its previous major release, v2.0. This section discusses some of those changes:
Updated Hardware and Automation Environment Support
With every release comes additional support for Dell's latest server models including the PowerEdge M600 Series Blade Servers. Dell offers an M600 (Intel based) and an M605 (AMD based) 10G Blade Server. The latest Dell Deployment release comes bundled with v2.4.1 of the Dell Toolkit (DTK) and now includes support for 6th through 10th generation Dell servers with support for WinPE and Linux automation environments. DOS is no longer a supported automation environment in regards to bare metal hardware provisioning. However, it can still be used for the simple capture and distribution of image based OS deployments and executing other pre-OS scripts. Even still, a DOS pre-boot environment cannot match the speeds that a true 32-bit environment offers. With the support for DOS drivers being scarce, Linux is quickly becoming the preferred replacement for the following reasons:
- Open source and free to use
- Better driver support
- Support for x86, x64, and IA32 platforms
- Low overhead with a PXE image file only being about 15MB in size. Compare this in size to WinPE which can average around a 160MB footprint. This means boot to network times will be considerably lower which can offer faster server deployments considering the standard pre-defined bare metal to OS deployment job can require anywhere from 2-3 reboots during the provisioning process.
New Configuration Wizard
A new configuration wizard has been added to more easily add support for scripted OS installations, help install the pre-boot environments (WinPE or Linux) if they were not already created prior to the Dell Deployment add-on installation, and create the independent PXE image files optimized for Dell Server bare metal deployments. To keep things simple, the product only creates bare metal to OS jobs for the media support you provide during the installation of the product. For example, if a user only adds support for the Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition, that's the only bare metal to OS job that will be made available in the jobs pane of the console.
The wizard offers support for all the latest server operating systems including support for Windows and Linux (including RHEL and SUSE). It is also possible to use multiple instances of the same OS for various builds without having to duplicate the source files. So for example, if the need arises to offer a varied Windows server build or specify a unique Windows Product Key during the next deployment of your server, you now have the ability to do so. You can simply point to the previously copied source directory and specify your custom answer file with the desired changes for example. If deploying images is your method of OS deployment, the combination of the new Job Builder feature and the addition of basic Deployment Solution image capture/distribute tasks can enable this functionality. You can read more about the Job Builder feature later in this article.
Independent PXE Image Files
The product now offers the separation of the PXE image files, configured and tested to work with the Dell hardware, from the default PXE image files that are created during the installation of the product. So what exactly does this mean and how can it benefit you? A major benefit is the better interoperability with other vendor branded Deployment Solution add-on products. Rather than trying to force the peaceful coexistence of drivers from other hardware vendors and configurations that may only apply to one particular vendor, why not separate them? This concept is not uncommon to Altiris as it has been introduced in other products such as the Software Virtualization Solution (SVS) where applications can play in their own sandbox without effecting the baseline OS.
Job Builder
The Job Builder feature was added to help aid in the customization of bare metal to OS jobs allowing you to create a completely new job based on your specific requirements. For example, let's say you just installed the Dell Deployment add-on and you plan to use one of the pre-defined bare metal to scripted OS jobs automatically created based on the OS source files copied using the new configuration wizard during installation. Instead of configuring RAID dynamically (default behavior), you decide you want to configure based on specific rules or based on a captured RAID configuration file. By only checking the "Configure RAID" checkbox, you can create just the individual tasks that make up the new RAID provisioning job. The job is then created and named after whatever you called it and placed in the "Job Builder" folder. You then highlight the job, copy the individual tasks that make up the rule based RAID provisioning job to the clipboard, and replace the existing dynamic RAID provisioning tasks contained in the original pre-defined job with the new tasks from the clipboard. For more information on rule based RAID provisioning, see the respective section of this article.
Here's another example. As mentioned previously in the Configuration Wizard section of this article, bare metal to OS jobs are only created based on the OS source files that are copied during the installation. What happens if you don't copy OS source files during the install or your preferred method of OS distribution is image based leveraging a single image for Dell Servers? This is where the Job Builder comes in handy. Simply check the boxes of the desired configuration tasks, except for the "Scripted OS Install" checkbox as shown in Figure 4. Then simply add a "Distribute Disk Image" task, which is standard as part of the core Deployment Solution product, and point to your image file. The end result should look similar to Figure 5. For more information regarding hardware independent images for Dell Servers, refer to the "Building a Single Image for Dell PowerEdge Servers Using Altiris Deployment Solution" article in the Feb. 2007 edition of Power Solutions found here: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/power/ps1q07-...
Rule Based RAID Provisioning
This feature was driven by one of our largest and most influential customers and partners, Dell IT. As evidenced by recent published videos and success stories (Learn more at www.altiris.com/dell), Dell IT uses Altiris Deployment Solution to deploy and manage thousands of servers in their environment and they request the ability to provision the RAID array based on a series of rules or from a captured configuration file. So how does this differentiate from the dynamic RAID provisioning capabilities that have always been in the product? Dynamic RAID provisioning still accounts and applies for the majority of server builds where RAID arrays are created based on a single RAID controller (PERC) and the number of drives attached to that controller. For example, for non-blade servers with 1 drive, RAID 0 is created. For all other Dell models with 2 drives, RAID 1 is created and 3 or more drives, RAID 5 is created. For complex configurations where Servers may have more than one RAID controller, the need arises to configure other supported RAID arrays such as RAID 10 or 50, or you may want to configure global or dedicated hotspares, that's where the rule based RAID provisioning shows real value.
Pre-OS Hardware Updating
Traditionally, Dell Update Packages (DUPs) have always been designed to execute in a post-OS environment (Windows or Linux) and then upon the reboot of the server, apply the updates. The Dell Deployment product has always offered pre-defined jobs to remotely execute these DUPs by dragging and dropping update jobs to the managed server from within the console. With previous releases it was possible to update the BIOS in a pre-OS environment by extracting an .HDR file from the DUP and then applying it in a DOS pre-boot environment. This was a great way to ensure the BIOS was updated to its latest release before deploying an operating system and before the server was placed in production. With the advancement of product releases also comes phased out support for legacy platforms such as the lack of support for the DOS pre-boot automation environment with the DTK.
One of the new features of Dell Deployment 3.0 SP1 is the ability to update a Dell server's firmware in a Linux pre-boot automation environment leveraging the DUPs which were traditionally designed to be executed in the post-OS environment. Again, this ensures that all the hardware components such as the BIOS, BMC, DRAC, and RAID components are updated to the latest and greatest before the Server is placed in production. Updating the operating system drivers for the NIC's and RAID components will still take place in a post-OS environment due to the nature of these updates. For more information regarding Dell Server pre-boot firmware updating, refer to the following article on the Dell Juice site: http://www.symantec.com/connect/node/3253.
Once the server is then placed into production, you can then leverage yet another free solution from Altiris, the Altiris Patch Management Solution for Dell Servers to help ensure that Dell firmware and drivers stay up to date in the production environment. This solution scans servers for compliance and offers a simple policy based "set it and forget it" distribution method to keep everything updated. For more information refer to the following link: http://www.altiris.com/Products/PatchManagementSol...
Common UPIMG.BIN file for Dell Diagnostic Partition
In the past, in order to install the 32MB Dell Diagnostic Partition as part of the provisioning process required copying the respective UPIMG.BIN file from the Dell Server Assistant (DSA) CD for each model of Dell PowerEdge Server to be deployed. Now, one common file is used for all Dell PowerEdge models and is included by default as part of the installation. This helps to further reduce the one time post-install configuration steps required for simple drag and drop deployment.
Out of Band Power Control
The ability to power control through the DRAC and/or BMC (IPMI) interface is not a new feature, however, we've improved the discovery process in searching for these devices thereby enabling the right mouse click power control to the managed servers in the Deployment Console. Figure 8 shows the enablement of the right mouse click power control. The top portion of the menu is in-band power control through the Deployment Solution AClient agent. The lower portion of the menu is the out of band power control.
Dell OEM Extensions in Boot Disk Creator
Another powerful feature of the Dell Deployment add-on, but not new to the major release of v3.0, is the ability to add Dell driver and configuration support to an automation boot disk. Typically this support has only been added to the respective PXE image files, but what happens if the customer does not use PXE in their environment and they have the need to boot the server from a bootable CD or USB thumb drive? They now have the ability to build their own custom automation boot disk with the full Dell support needed for optimum bare metal deployments though the Deployment Solution Boot Disk Creator.
M1000e Support
With the release of the M1000e and the chassis accommodating 16 Blades instead of its 10 blade predecessor, Altiris Deployment Solution for Dell Servers has been updated to support this hardware change. Blade Servers have the option of being pre-provisioned in the console by creating virtual bays. The virtual bays can be assigned to unique characteristics of the Blade Servers such as their Service Tag, MAC Address, or Asset Tag. When the blade boots to PXE and the primary key lookup is read, Altiris Deployment Server executes the jobs that have been assigned to that particular bay. In addition, all computers have the ability to be pre-provisioned with the use of a Deployment Solution provided Excel spreadsheet by the name of IMPORTCOMPUTERS55.XLS. This file can be found in the .\Samples folder of the eXpress share and is a very powerful method of predetermining the role and configuration of the computers before they ever touch your network. Once pre-provisioned in the console, junior technicians can just unbox the server and power it on - they never have to touch the Altiris console to deploy a computer - the right builds route to the correct machines automatically.
Figure 10: Deployment Console showing virtual bay support for the M1000e modular chassis
Rip and Replace Support
Traditionally, rip and replace support for the Dell PowerEdge Blade Servers has been triggered by the MAC Address of the primary NIC of that particular managed blade server. This MAC Address is stored in the cache of the Altiris PXE Server. When a managed blade server is removed from the chassis slot and inserted with a new, unmanaged, blade server and powered on, the Altiris PXE Server does not recognize the new MAC Address and executes 1 of 4 user defined blade change rules.
The M1000e's modular chassis will soon introduce a new management feature that involves the persistent naming of the WorldWide Name and MAC Address where this information can be dynamically tied to each individual chassis slot. This means that Deployment Solution can no longer rely on the MAC Address as the identifying lookup key to trigger blade change rule management. The next release of Altiris Deployment Solution v6.9 will offer alternatives to circumvent this new technology. In addition to just being able to set the MAC address as the primary lookup key, you will also be able to set the Serial Number (Dell Service Tag), Asset Tag, and UUID to continue triggering the native rip and replace functionality that Deployment Solution offers.
For more information regarding Rip and Replace support, refer to the "Simplifying Blade Server Management with Altiris Deployment Solution" article in the Feb. 2007 edition of Power Solutions found here: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/power/ps1q07-...
For More Information
There are many web sites available that discuss server deployment concepts supported by Altiris Deployment Solution. Perhaps the most popular site for Dell-specific server deployment with this product is www.altiris.com/delldeploy. This is the one-stop for installation and configuration resources containing quick start guides and videos, product documentation, links to knowledgebase forums, whitepapers, demonstration videos, and customer success stories and videos, including Dell IT.
Additional links include:
http://www.symantec.com/connect/dell
www.altiris.com/dellwhitepapers
For more information pertaining to the Dell Alliance at Altiris, now part of Symantec, please refer to www.altiris.com/dell.
Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, February 2008. Copyright ® 2008 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.