Aaron Delp’s BladeVault.info

In my day to day activities I depend a lot on the hardware vendor forums for the products I support.  I wanted to take a second to share all the links I have acquired.  Some will be obvious to everyone, but a few of them are pretty obscure.  Enjoy!

• Q-Logic Adapter Forums
• BNT (Nortel) IBM BladeCenter switch Forum
• VMWare Communities
• NetApp Communties
• HP BladeSystem Forum
• HP Insight Manager Forum
• HP Proliant Server Forum
• HP iLO Forum
• IBM Blade Forum
• IBM System x Server Forum
• IBM Director Forum

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.

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