Aaron Delp’s BladeVault

IBM also has a Power Calculator, available here.  The IBM tool is a little rough around the edges, but it gets the job done.

The IBM tool is a download vs. an on-line tool.  The configuration of a chassis is very easy to do and the report is very straight forward.  I would like to see a user populated utilization level to customize the report but you can make the calculations yourself with the information provided.  Lastly, IBM allows you to add the PDU’s you need, a nice touch.
IBM only supports exporting the data to an Xls format.  All in all, a bit of an ugly baby but it provides the necessary information.

In case you haven’t seen it, HP has a great power sizer for the BladeSystem that is available here. You will need an HP Passport ID to get into the site. The tool is very easy to use and configure. I like the ability to customize the utilization level to choose a value other than 100%. When the calculations are complete an idle amount is given as well as a utilization level.

There are three different types of reports the tool will produce: A printable version (that you can print to PDF), a Doc version, and an Xls version. Of the three different versions, the doc version is the most complete and looks the best for customer consumption.

One pet peeve though… HP, please remove the shopping list at the end with list prices!! Let’s face facts, list prices are useless to most people and this should be a technical report, not a sales pitch! Other than that, it is a very easy to use tool, check it out!

This is an update to this article on the IBM HS21 BIOS 1.07B.

IBM has confirmed to me that this is a problem that should be addressed in another BIOS patch. The only OS that seems to be affected is Red Hat. According to IBM support, it turns out that the BIOS looks at the stepping levels of the chips and if the second CPU level is different than the fist CPU level, it will “mask” them to the OS so this problem will be avoided.

For some reason, there is a bug in the code as of 1.07B that this doesn’t happen. It has been confirmed and should be corrected shortly.

UPDATE: This article has been updated here.

This is a follow up to my previous article about HP Blades not booting iSCSI. I have learned that the HP Blades do boot (and are supported!) some Linux OS’s. Microsoft is still not supported and I don’t have the official word on VMWare yet. I should have an official list next week. As soon as I get it, I will post it here.

This is actually old news and is one of those you won’t believe it until you try it kind of tips. It occurred to me to post this tip when I was creating the bootable floppies to flash the HBA and TOE cards.

Believe it or not, IBM Blade Centers (and most IBM servers these days) will not boot to an NEC USB Floppy. In order to boot to a floppy, it has to be a TEAC floppy disk drive. For whatever reason, the NEC drive doesn’t pick up as a boot device and the system will by-pass it.

If you are using IBM Blades in a Boot from SAN configuration and you want to flash to the latest BIOS and firmwares, how do you do it before you install the OS?

The answer is good old DOS. The 4GB HBA and iSCSI cards are both made by Q-logic and if you look hard enough, you will see that they provide DOS utilities to flash both of these cards to the latest version, if you have a DOS boot disk. Remember the DOS Boot Disk? Do you still have some in your desk or in a storage cabinet somewhere?

If you’re like me, it took a little bit to come up with a floppy drive and some blank media to work with. I didn’t want to go through this again so I created the disks, made IMG files of them, and stored them on the site for safe keeping. I created a custom page over here if you are interested in downloading them. I also included the commands to invoke the flash for both disks.

Hello all – Just a quick note that I haven’t been posting because I spent the last week getting the site up to speed on Wordpress.  The site is now configured with plug-ins, feeds are on feedburner, etc.  If you are reading this on the feed and you haven’t been by the site, take a look and let me know what you think!

Also, I just got back from the doctor and I have Bronchitis.  Not fun!!  I’ll be laying in bed the next few days so no new posts for a bit longer.  Thanks!

This one is more for my archive than anything else. We set up some Cisco 3020’s in an HP Blade System recently and after a few weeks at the customer site none of the switches were accessible over IP. The switch config didn’t change and everything was fine when the hardware was set up. The only thing out of the ordinary was the switch was given a hard coded IP address on fa0 as opposed to using EBIPA and providing a DHCP address.

Since the switch was in production we were wary to make any big changes. The fa0 port was listed as up/up and it shows the IP address. You could also ping the IP of the switch from the switch but you could not ping outside the switch. We had the same issue trying to connect from the OA into the switch. The simple fix was to shut/no shut the fa0 port on the switch. After this IP was reset and it was off and running!

Thanks to Kevin for this one!

I had a chance to play with the IBM Blade Center Intelligent Pass-thru Module (IPM) on Friday. The device looks pretty slick, as long as you are using it in the right environment. We were told by IBM that the OPM (old 2GB max Optical Pass-thru Module) was going End of Life in January. So, being the good little Partner we are, we moved our customer to the IPM.

It turns out the IPM is a whole different beast. The OPM was a device that simply passed the optical signal from the expansion card on the blade to an external optical network or FC switch. This relationship was a one to one ratio.

The new IPM is basically a “dumb” Q-Logic FC switch that doesn’t participate in the FC fabric. It takes the 14 internal connections and pipes them through 6 external connections. The internal to external port mapping is configurable in the switch. The switch can also be upgraded (and downgraded back down) at any time to either a 10-port or 20-port FC switch.

All in all, it is a pretty slick set up but this approach does have down sides that the OPM didn’t have. First, the OPM had a one to one ratio (limited to 2GB speed) and second, the OPM can be used for Ethernet. The IPM has the advantage of 4GB speed and user configurable mapping of internal to external ports.

Our customer was using the OPM to pass Ethernet to Cisco switches so this wasn’t a good solution for them!! We made a few calls and it turns out we weren’t the only ones. IBM is now planning to continue production of the OPM for the near future.

Link to the IBM Redpaper on the IPM

In the near future I will be starting my first series of posts here at The Blade Blog in addition to the standard news postings. The number one area I receive questions about for both IBM and HP Blades is power. Anything from the types of plugs, how to set up the PDUs, how many Amps/Watts we’re going to draw, etc.

So, I was wondering what areas you would like to see more information in regards to power. I plan on covering both the HP and IBM Power Tools (did you know they had power tools?), PDUs and plugs, Amp and Watt calculations, power supply domains and failover scenarios, and other topics as they come up. I would love your feed back on the subject!

This was just posted today and it is a very interesting read. Xtravirt.com has released a commentary regarding VMWare Workstation’s inability to run ESX 3.5 in a VM.

I am hoping that the next version of Workstation will address this issue (that’s the rumor according to the VMWare boards) because I know the company won’t be upgrading the old laptop any time soon!

Some time ago Scott Lowe wrote up a great article on how to set up link state tracking for Cisco switches on both IBM and HP Blades.

I have set up a number of the switches lately and I wanted to add two more commands that I consider default settings on the switch to make your life easier before deployment. You will want to check with the network admin once you are on-site and probably modify them again to meet customer requirements.

vtp mode transparent
no service config (on the HP Cisco 3020 switches)

VTP Mode Transparent will place the switches into a mode where they will not participate in the VTP Domain to pass VLAN information to other Cisco switches in your organization. This allows you to “sandbox” the switch at the customer site and make sure everything plays well before you place the switch in the VTP domain. This prevents VTP problems if your VTP number is higher than the customer’s number, which would push your VTP settings out to the rest of the organization, providing they didn’t change the default VTP domain name. Sounds crazy, but it can happen.

No Service Config on the HP Blade Cisco switches will disable the “smart” feature in the switch where it will broadcast for a TFTP service to configure itself. If you don’t want/need this feature, simply enter this command in the config and it will go away. You will know you have this feature turned on if you are getting the following error in the switch logs and console on a regular basis:

%Error opening tftp://255.255.255.255/network-confg (Socket error)
%Error opening tftp://255.255.255.255/cisconet.cfg (Socket error)
%Error opening tftp://255.255.255.255/3620-confg (Socket error)
%Error opening tftp://255.255.255.255/3620.cfg (Socket error)