Aaron Delp’s BladeVault

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!

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)

I was recently asked by a customer if you can mix the IBM CFFh (Compact Form Factor, Horizontal) blade cards with the “legacy” expansion cards. The only expansion cards that will co-exist physically on a blade are the CFFv (Compact Form Factor, Vertical) cards. The legacy cards will not physically attach on the blade at the same time. If you have a customer that has legacy expansion cards already in place, they will have to be replaced. Also, please note that if the legacy card is an iSCSI card, you will not be able to move to the CFFv form factor.

Please see the IBM Redbook on the Blade Products for more information.

UPDATE #2: This article has been updated here.

UPDATE: This article has been updated here.

I have been asked this question a number of times by customers here in the Triangle area. The new family of HP Blades, the c-Class Blades, do not iSCSI boot at this time. The IBM Blades will boot with the Q-Logic iSCSI expansion card but there is not an equivalent HP Product at this time. This fact can be a key differentiator in some accounts and is a good bit of knowledge to keep in your back pocket when positioning IBM vs. HP Blades.

This article has been updated here. 

This one is a little dated but I wanted to share in case you are seeing this problem in the field. Back in November IBM released version 1.07 BIOS for the HS21 Blades. With certain types of processors, you would see a 199 (Processor Mismatch) error on the next boot if two processors were installed in the machine. This would happen even if the stepping levels were matched. I brought this to IBM’s attention and BIOS 1.07b was released on Dec 21, 2007.

This BIOS fixes the problem but we have found an instance where loading Redhat Workstation 4, Update 3 (SeverProven OS by the way) will cause a kernel panic during installation if the stepping levels of the OS are mismatched and the highest stepping level is in CPU slot 0. I don’t know if other versions of Red Hat are affected. The work around for now is to swap the lowest stepping level into slot 0 and reinstall the OS. It has been years since we’ve had to worry about stepping levels so hopefully IBM is working on a fix. I spoke to support a few days ago and they were passing this along to the BIOS team. I’ll post here with updates.