Deployment Solution

One of the main reasons for using Deployment Solution for Dell Servers 3.0 is it integrates the Dell OpenManage Toolkit with Deployment Solution. It also provides jobs for capturing configuration files for a machine's BIOS, Dell Remote Access Card (DRAC), Base Management Controller (BMC) and RAID controller. Where these files end up, and how to effectively use them in a deployment environment is another story however.

This article explains the file capturing and configuring process, and how to leverage the features offered by Deployment Solution for Dell Servers. While in depth coverage of all the nuances of the DTK will not be covered (that is what the DTK users guide is for), common scenarios, and pitfalls will be explained, and how to avoid them.

Explanation of specialized Dell Server Hardware:

Servers are different animals from PCs. They are more powerful, reliable, and have many more features in place for resilience when faults do occur. Specialized hardware that we can configure using Deployment Solution for Dell Servers 3.0 is as follows:

Dell Remote Access Card (DRAC): Think of this as a little embedded computer with its own Network Interface Card. Most current DRAC cards have an embedded web server that can be accessed through a web browser. The latest DRAC cards offer Remote Console Re-direction allowing you to view the screen of the machine via a browser. In addition, nearly all DRAC cards support remote power control options such as power on, power cycle (hard reboot), and hard power off.

Base Management Controllers: These are very similar to DRACs, in that they offer remote power control features, and have their own network connection, but most models out today do not support graphical console redirection. They also communicate using an Intel standard called IPMI.

RAID Controller: This device is a controller for SCSI, SAS or SATA drives and can link these drives together in several different methods we call RAID levels. RAID configuration is not trivial, but Deployment Solution for Dell Servers 3.0 not only allows us to clone raid configurations among many machines, but gives us a convenient graphical configuration tool to accomplish custom RAID configurations.

BIOS: This isn't really much different from BIOSs of PCs, except that we can configure this BIOS through a configuration file.

Capturing a Configuration File:

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Configuration files are captured using these jobs under "Capture Configuration Input Files" and contain the individual settings for that device. The first three, will capture each individual configuration file and the last job will capture all three at once. When files are captured, they are put on the datastore within these directories:

Dell\configfiles\system - All system configuration files (1st job on list)

Dell\configfiles\drac - All DRAC configuration Files (2nd job on list)

Dell\configfiles\RAID - All RAID configuration files (3rd job on list)

What may be confusing to beginners, is that whenever a configuration file is captured, two files are produced. For example, if I run a Get DRAC Configuration File job on a Dell PowerEdge 6850, and navigate to the Dell\configfiles\drac folder, I will see the following:

Click to view.

We have names for these two files, the first file (PE6850.ini) is the "Generic Model Configuration File", and will be used by the default Configure DRAC job. You want to use this configuration file if you intend to configure all your 6850's using the same settings. The second file (5000001.ini) is called the "Computer Configuration File" and can be used for configuration if you create a configure DRAC job using the job builder, and select "Existing computer configuration file". The file is named after the machine ID assigned by DS. To discover this number, right click a machine in the console, go to properties, and find the Machine ID field. Use this "Computer configuration file" to configure your machines if you intend to configure several machines of the same model in different ways.

There is one other thing that I should probably mention concerning the capturing of these configuration files. If your DRAC or BMC cards are using static IP addressing, the configuration file will contain the IP address it is configured to, such as:

ipaddress=192.168.0.237

This is ok, except if we do a configure using the "Generic Model Configuration File", all machine's cards will be using the same IP address. Bad news! Therefore, if you are using static IP addresses on your network, we recommend you enable "IP address insertion" on the IP Ranges tab of the Configuration Utility. Do this by checking the box with the label "Replace IP address with a token in captured configuration files". What this will do, is after a configuration file is captured, it will go to the generic model configuration file (not the computer configuration file) and find the line that contains the IP address, and replace the IP address with a token (think of it as a place holder). Later when the file is used in a configuration, that token will be replaced by the next available IP address from a pool of IP addresses you defined on the IP Ranges tab of the Configuration Utility.

Using this mechanism, you can configure all your DRAC or BMC devices from the same configuration file, without having any duplicate IP addresses.

Configuring using Configuration Files:

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These jobs configure your hardware devices using already captured configuration files that are residing on the datastore. The first two jobs will use the Generic Model Configuration Files for the System and DRAC respectively. Configuring RAID is slightly different, in that there is only a Computer configuration file (5000001.ini). Therefore, use the third job to configure the RAID controller on a machine using a configuration file that has it's machine ID. The fourth job, will run the "dynamic RAID" which will configure RAID 0 if one disk is found, RAID 1 if two disks are found, or RAID 5 if 3 or more disks are found. Dynamic RAID configuration does not reference any configuration file. The last job "Configure All" will do the first, second, and 4th job on the list back to back.

IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT 9th GENERATION SERVERS!

Some people may be confused because their 9th generation servers DRAC card does not appear to be configuring. The secret to this mystery is that while a DRAC configuration file is captured on 9th generation servers, all DRAC settings also reside in the System configuration file. Therefore, if you make your DRAC configuration changes in the system configuration file, and then run a "Configure All", your new DRAC settings will be configured when the Configure System task is run, but they will immediately be overwritten when the configure DRAC task is done.

The simplest solution to this problem is to simply delete the DRAC configuration file for all 9th generation servers once they are captured, and only use System configuration files with your 9th generation servers, since they contain all the same settings.

An Example:

Suppose I have 100 Dell PowerEdge 6850's, and I want to configure their BIOS. The first 90, I want to be configured identically, the last 10 I need to have custom settings, each different from the other. I will do the following:

1. Run "Get DRAC configuration File" on one 6850
2. Open Dell\configfiles\DRAC and edit the PE6850.ini file to have the settings I want for the 90 machines I want configured identically.
3. Make 10 copies of the computer configuration file (5000001.ini) and name each according to the machine ID for those 10 servers I want configured custom.
4. Edit each of these 10 computer configuration files with their individual custom settings.
5. Run the default "Configure DRAC" job on the 90 machines I want configured identically (this configure job will use the pe6850.ini file to configure.
6. Open the job builder, check "Configure DRAC" and then set "Existing Computer Configuration File". Build the job naming it "Configure DRAC using Computer Configuration File"
7. Run that job you just created on the remaining 10 6850's.

This same example could be done for BMC or BIOS settings.

Some of the gotchas

Configuration files when they are captured sometimes contain values that are invalid for configuration. These lines must either be deleted or commented out. For instance, system configuration files may contain the line:

"destipaddr=0.0.0.0"

This effectively means that a destination IP address has not been configured, however if you use this value to configure, 0.0.0.0 is an invalid address, therefore this line must be commented out with a semicolon before your configuration is run.

Sometimes messages to the user are inserted into the configuration file indicating something that is misconfigured. For example:

"The option ipaddrsrc is not set to a valid option."

If you see a message such as this, you must fix the associated line, and delete the message or else the configuration will fail.

Troubleshooting Tricks

If you are testing out a never used before configuration file and it fails, the job will fail, and your machine will reboot. Unless you immediately schedule a new job, your machine will be put into an unmanaged state. This is where the "Wait" task comes in handy. Click on your configure job, and create a condition that will run a "wait task" (found under Add>> Wait) if the job fails. This will keep the machine in automation, allowing you to edit the configure file, and rerun the job as many times as you need until you are successful.