iDRAC & Dell MD1000

For the past week I’ve been looking at our new MD1000e blade enclosure. With the push towards virtualization and redundancy, blade architecture is obviously a major leap forward.... 2xBlade enclosures, clustered blade servers & SAN = 100% uptime..... in theory.

So far I’ve just been configuring the MD1000e chassis. For those who don’t know the chassis is the rack mountable unit which holds all the blade servers. It contains the PSUs, the fans and the network ports, which means your blades don’t contain any of the above and can be smaller in size. The MD1000e takes up 10u in a Dell cabinet, and can hold 16 servers. With standard poweredge servers we would like to get around 2 or 3 servers in a 10 u space.

The MD1000e has a myriad of features accessible from the web interface. My tip of the day is that when you first switch the MD1000e on and it asks “do you want to complete the configuration wizard now?”, DONT answer “no”. If you answer “no” the only way you can give the management port (CMC) and IP address is by hooking the unit up to a laptop and using a null modem lead.

Once configured, you can view the health of all your blades, start them up, shut them down etc etc. One beautiful feature is that you can assign IP addresses to the management port of any blades which might be plugged in. So you give the MD1000e 16 addresses to play with, and each time you plug a blade in, and IP will automatically be given to the blade’s iDRAC port. This is extremely important if you don’t have a kvm built into your MD1000e, or you don’t want to sit in front of 32 fans roughly equalling the power of a military class jet engine with a mouse and keyboard on your lap.

Using the iDRAC of each blade, you can connect to the server and install an OS as if you were sat in front of it.... actually you wouldn’t even be able to do it sat in front of it come to think of it. Using this you can load up an ISO or share your local drive to install 2008 or whatever OS you desire.

Getting the unit up and running initially isn’t a 2 minute job, but it’s worth the effort, and extremely impressive bit of kit!

Our blades will initially be getting server 2008 data centre edition installed, with the hyper-v role in clustered mode.