Hello, We are planning to use xCAT to deploy ESX on an HP BladeSystem c7000 cluster (BL460C Gen 9 blade servers). For the time being I was going to skip iLo setup since I am confused about how to get that working with xCAT. However, what I want to know is if I can still do autodiscovery of our nodes as long as the nodes are defined in the switch table and the switches have SNMP enabled. The documentation available online sends mixed signals about this.
Sumavi's documentation seems in some places to suggest that SNMP being enabled is the only critical component for autodiscovery: "*So you may not have the ability to have SNMP read access to the network switches to do autodiscovery. Not a problem. You'll just have to fill in the MAC addresses yourself.*" (From: http://sumavi.com/sections/skipping-autodiscovery) Elsewhere it also seems to suggest SNMP is all is needed: "*If xCAT doesn't know who the node is, then it will automatically run the autodiscover code. This code looks through all the switches in the switch table trying to map the port to the mac to the node. It does this by running snmpwalk commands through the switches.*" But then it disappointingly (and possibly outdated-ly) says: "*Autodiscovery has not been tested with HP blades. Therefore, you are better off just running getmacs when these nodes are defined to map the mac address*." (From: http://sumavi.com/sections/understanding-autodiscovery) But then elsewhere it says this, which seems to imply that the management module is needed for autodiscovery, and not merely SNMP: "*In order to automate discovery for IPMI and iLo nodes there needs to be a mapping of nodes to switch ports. This relationship is defined in the switch table. The methods, passwords, etc to communicate with the switches is in the switches table. Notice that with blades this step usually isn't necessary. xCAT can discover IBM blades through the management module.*" (From: http://sumavi.com/sections/switch-and-switches) Is this perhaps only talking about the nodeX-bmc definition in regards to autodiscovery and not the base nodeX definition itself? My main question is, based on the above, if SNMP and the management module both have a part to play in autodiscovery is there any chance that HP Blades can work with discovery, as long as I explicitly map the nodes to port numbers in the switch table? Will I have to configure iLo to make autodiscovery work or can I leave iLo alone and just enable SNMP and configure the switch table? Thanks, Josh Nielsen
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