This IBM BladeCenter H installation I’ve been working on with another engineer for the last couple of days is not going as smoothly as we both would have liked. I don’t know if this is indicative of the BladeCenter H chassis itself, or if it’s just me. While some would say it’s just me, I suspect it’s a little of both.
For example, we ran into issues with the Management Modules “freaking out,†and failing over between the modules didn’t solve the problem. In fact, we had to power down both management modules and then power them back up one at a time in order to get the fans to finally settle down. Otherwise, the chassis sounded like a jet turbine getting ready to take off, and—get this—people outside the datacenter could hear the chassis.
Even after getting that settled down, there was still some weirdness with the IBM KVM switch that we still haven’t resolved (kept freaking out the keyboard and causing it to stop working). We had to plug in a separate USB keyboard in order to work with the chassis. That particular issue still hasn’t been resolved.
The real kicker, though, was the problem we ran into with the floppy drive. The design called for boot from SAN via iSCSI (using LUNs off a Network Appliance storage system) using Qlogic HBAs. This is a supported configuration, but requires the use of a driver floppy during the installation of Windows Server 2003. The older BladeCenter chassis had a built-in floppy, but the BladeCenter H does not, and the USB floppy that we tried to use wouldn’t work. No matter how hard we tried, the blade(s) just wouldn’t see the floppy drive. Until we can get a floppy drive recognized during the Windows setup process, we can’t get Windows installed and we are just stuck.
Anyone else run into similar issues with a BladeCenter H?
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Sunday, June 3, 2007 at 1:55 pm
J.Cruz
We have a couple of BladeCenter H’s over here, but haven’t run into the issue with the MM’s freaking out (are you using Advanced MM’s or the regular MM’s?)
As for the floppy drive issue, what we’ve done in the past is create an image of the floppy using EMT4WIN and then uploading that to the Remote Console of the Management Module.
Hope that helps!
Sunday, June 3, 2007 at 6:03 pm
Ausmith1
The easiest thing to do in such a situation is to build a custom Windows install CD and boot up with that. You can integrate the mass storage drivers of your choice and the install will see your storage from the get go. You can even slipstream all the Windows QFEs as well so the system is protected from the first time it boots.
Personally I use HFSLIP, but nLite works quite well too.
http://hfslip.org/
http://www.nliteos.com/
Monday, June 4, 2007 at 10:01 pm
William Bishop
Cruz actually has the simpler of options. It’s ridiculously easy to assign a cd or floppy image to a blade via the web console. He could be in and out in a couple minutes versus the time it takes to build a custom windows installation for what could be a one-off.
If you need any help, email me, I suspect you can read it from the reply, but if not, it’s
wbishop@hhsys.org
Trust me, I’ve got WAYmore bladecenter time than I want under my belt. It’s a bit annoying at first, but you’ll come to love it.
Monday, June 4, 2007 at 10:15 pm
slowe
Cruz, William,
Good information–we uploaded a floppy image to the management module (we’re using the Advanced MMs, by the way) and that took care of it for us. EMT4WIN was a total bust (the image never worked), but uploading a floppy image directly worked just fine. Either way, we were able to get the driver loaded into Windows and had no further problems. The MM problems continue; we’re placing a service call to have one of them replaced tomorrow.
I don’t know that I’ll ever “come to love it,” but I do understand it a bit better now than I did.
Ausmith1,
I like the idea of integrating the QFEs so that the post-install patch time isn’t so tedious. I’ve looked at nLite briefly to help reduce disk space utilization in VDI deployments, but will have to look at it again for this purpose. Fortunately for me, using the floppy disk image solved the problem with this particular installation, and then the ever-handy “vol copy” in Data ONTAP made it possible to provision six more blades in a matter of minutes. Sweet!
Thursday, June 14, 2007 at 9:57 pm
William Bishop
You may need to update the firmware on the MM. There are a lot of weird affects from out of date firmware, and IBM is notorious for fixing them promptly(one of the reasons I’ve come to love them since I started dealing with big iron). Updating the firmware is easy, you download and decompress the patch file, and use the web tool to browse to it, click and you’re done. The last patch fixed a lot of issues for me, I highly recommend it.
Thursday, June 14, 2007 at 10:43 pm
slowe
William,
Actually, it turns out that most–if not all–of the issues we’ve run into are actually caused by a bug in the current MM firmware. It turns out that this is one of only 2 installations in the country currently dealing with this issue, and we’re waiting on IBM to let us know if we should back-rev the MMs or wait for a patch.