This post was co-written by Satyajit Desai, Pushkala Iyer and Cyril Jose
One of the pain points of the data center system administrator in using the existing Out of Band (OOB) server management technology is to read through the management profile documents and understand the operations involved. These perations are potentially distinct commands depending upon the server subsystem being configured. Not only do you need to correlate the various documents to the components being configured, you also need to know the right sequence to achieve the desired end state configuration.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a simpler way to achieve this? Read on to know more…
End State Server Configuration via single command using configuration XML file
With Lifecycle Controller 2 1.1.0.1108 and iDRAC7 1.30.30 or later, a snapshot of server configuration can be generated in XML format with an "Export Server Configuration" operation. Any configuration changes can be specified via XML and can be applied to one or more systems via the "Import Server Configuration" operation.
If you are a system administrator, this means you no longer need to remember multiple commands on how to configure multiple aspects of the system. Rather, you will have a single command and can specify the aspects of what needs to be configured on multiple components via an XML file.
If you are a console application developer, this means you no longer need to remember various operations to be performed in sequence to achieve a desired end state. Rather, the end state can be specified in human readable XML format and sent to firmware to do the rest.
Dell continues to listen to customer pain points and provides ways to alleviate them using iDRAC7 with Lifecycle Controller technology.
Additional Information
White Papers:
- The whitepaper Configuration XML workflow explains how the most common workflows could be achieved using this feature.
- To know more about the server configuration XML file definition refer to the whitepaper Server Configuration XML file.
Video and Sample Scripts:
- There are also some sample scripts and a video that would come in handy to understand this powerful feature.