Hello everybody, it is
been so long since my last post here, but now I'm back :) and today
I'm going to describe my last assignment for provisioning system.
So let's get it started
straight with the problem. I got a few racks filled with Dell servers
and they should be configured and provisioned with Linux as fast as I
can do it. After wondering
which provisioning solution to choose I pick cobbler.
For anyone, who
configured Dell servers, knows that the basic configuration of BIOS,
iDRAC and RAID can costs you almost half of the time of installing
OS. With so much hardware I'll need 2-3 days doing the same task like
a monkey, only to prepare the servers for OS deployment. So I decided
to go with some sort of auto configuration solution, that will help
me, deliver them times faster. As I mentioned I have already decided
to use provisioning services for OS deployment and start digging this
direction. After some googling I found that Dell provides automatic
deployment (DTK) tool for configuring the system (BIOS, iDRAC, RAID)
and even installing an OS. Unfortunately, it is highly limited to
RHEL, SUSE Enterprise and Windows. But it is superb for configuring a
bare metal server and you got working iDRAC for no time.
You can get the Dell
Deployment Toolkit from here.
Unfortunately after a while, the link for downloading OpenManage Deployment
Toolkit for Linux x64 became broken, but after some googling I found
the most recent (as the date of these writing) DTK version from 11
November 2014, you can get it from here.
You can mount it and see what we got in the iso file:
# mount -t iso9660 -o
loop dtk_4.4_1294_Linux64_A01.iso /mnt
Two of the directories
are interesting to us. The first one is RPMs/ and the second one is
isolinux/. Before we continue let's clear out what are
our possibilities and how we can achieve our goal with Dell DTK. First we need some tools to export the existing configuration from already installed and configured server. Then there should be some environment in which we can upload already exported files and import them on a new system. We
need some sort of script that runs in minimal OS environment and changes the BIOS
configuration (I'll use for short BIOS, but I mean all of them BIOS,
iDRAC and RAID) and after a one or two restarts we got working iDRAC
and fortunately RAID configuration. This is our goal and on the other
hand Dell DTK provide us with exactly this functionality. The three tools that we will do the job are: SYSCFG, RAIDCFG and RACADM. These tools along with others can
be found in the RPMs/ directory. There is a very nice video tutorial
how to install them on RHEL6/ CentOS 6 in the Dell DTK Wiki. We can save the current configuration to a
file, edit it and installed it directly to a new server with the same tools.
The first one, which I'm going
to use will be SYSCFG. It can be used for configuring primarily BIOS.
You can dump your whole current configuration with the command:
# syscfg -o
bios-settings.ini
The output file is in ini
format and it is quite long. I'm not going to discuss different parts
of the file. You can see what every variable sets from the Dell
OpenManage Deployment Toolkit Command Line Interface Reference Guide
(I got it from here).
If you considering using the DTK seriously have a look at its user's guide.
Once you got the BIOS
configuration it is good to get the RAID one as well with:
# raidcfg -o=raidcfg.ini
The different
configuration parts can be found in the Reference guide as well. The last thing we need is
iDRAC configuration and we can get it with the most powerful tool,
which is capable of configuring some of the BIOS settings as well,
RACADM. RACADM is actually a tool for cli connection to iDRAC module
mostly through SSH. You can read and write different configuration
variables, export and import a configuration, create users. It is
quite flexible and most of the information can be found here.
Actually, there is more recent version of iDRAC – v. 8, but my
environment consist of version 7 modules. So to export your current
iDRAC configuration type:
# racadm getconfig -f
idrac-config.ini
As the others files this
one has INI syntax, but it is quite large. Almost all of the iDRAC
configuration options can be found there. However there are few, that
are not present. Complete list of options can be found in the
reference guide.
Finally we got a
configured server, that is gonna be used as a template and we took
all of its configuration in files we will use in future deployments.
