Two weeks ago we had the opportunity to do some work for a customer in Brussels, Belgium and to use a Hewlett Packard blade system. The HP blade rack was stored in a separate computer room from the training room and we used full remote access to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 from a USB key attached to a laptop running SuSE Linux. The USB key contained ISO images from the 4 RHEL 4 installation CDs.
A (not very good mobile phone) picture of the naked front of the blades:
Another picture of the front of the actual blade boards. You can see clearly the hard drives attached to the motherboards and the cable attaching the management and diagnostics console to the system:
A final image of a blade server "tray". The (very noisy) fans are clearly visible doing their job keeping the dual core CPUs at the right temparature:
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The purpose of the exercise was to provide a classroom server, running RHEL 4 with Apache, LDAP and DNS and to install it without any interaction with the physical blade hardware.
The installation did take some time of course as the installation ISOs had to be accessed from the USB (2.0) key, over the network to the blade (it was part of the fun getting that to work). We used the HP's "Integrated Lights Out" iLO console to "mount" the USB key as if it was a locally attached CD/DVD drive. Click here for a Wikipedia link to find out what iLO really is.
First we needed to identify ourselves to the iLO console through login as the administrator:
To access the ISO images on the memory stick click on "Virtual Devices" and in the dialogue point the virtual CD-Rom to the local image file (in our case it was on the memory stick on /media/ISO-STICK/:
A (not very good mobile phone) picture of the naked front of the blades:
The management console sits in a sliding tray, nicely tucked in at the top of the rack. It can be pulled out, the screen lifted and a keyboard becomes available from underneath (in this picture it shows running a non-open source operating environment, sorry):
bThe installation did take some time of course as the installation ISOs had to be accessed from the USB (2.0) key, over the network to the blade (it was part of the fun getting that to work). We used the HP's "Integrated Lights Out" iLO console to "mount" the USB key as if it was a locally attached CD/DVD drive. Click here for a Wikipedia link to find out what iLO really is.
First we needed to identify ourselves to the iLO console through login as the administrator:
After successful login the iLO console displays the status summary menu from where several tasks can be performed:
We connected (virtually) the first RHEL4 ISO on the memory stick and now the system can boot from it.
To be able to see the installation process and answer the questions asked by Anaconda we enabled the "Remote Console" from the iLO main menu (see previous screenshot above). iLO will launch a Java application with a view on the virtual console:
The above screenshot shows the installation halfway during the Red Hat packages copy and install process. The reason the remaining time is high is caused by us "removing" the virtual CD-Rom at one point at the end of the day. Allowing the system to generate an error message (with a retry option to re-read the CD-Rom), leaving the building for the evening and night, returning back the next morning, remounting the ISO image to the virtual CD-Rom and allowing Anaconda to retry reading the CD-Rom. Amazingly enough it worked and the installation did continue where it had stopped although the timing was confused of course.
The following sceen shows the dialogue to insert another CD-Rom (disk 4), using the "Virtual Media" menu just umount the existing ISO image, point to the next ISO image and re-mount the file as a virtual CD-Rom:
To be able to see the installation process and answer the questions asked by Anaconda we enabled the "Remote Console" from the iLO main menu (see previous screenshot above). iLO will launch a Java application with a view on the virtual console:
The following sceen shows the dialogue to insert another CD-Rom (disk 4), using the "Virtual Media" menu just umount the existing ISO image, point to the next ISO image and re-mount the file as a virtual CD-Rom:
The timing eventually manage to correct itself, 35 minutes left!
Eventually we were rewarded with RHEL4' login menu through the virtual console:
Eventually we were rewarded with RHEL4' login menu through the virtual console:
The power of the Integrated Lights Out technology is clearly demonstrated. We installed a complete Red Hat Enterprise 4 installation without touching the actual hardware at any time. The installation worked very well over the network, using a standard laptop running SuSE 10.0 with a USB memory stick containing the RHEL 4 ISO images mounted as a virtual CD-Rom. Not bad, not bad at all. Can we have 10 please ;-).
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