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.

Dev Con & Dell

We have been having a serious issue with our latest Dell 755s. These PCs come with a built in 4 slot card reader. The A: drive is reserved for a floppy, C: is the local HDD, D: is taken by the DVD drive, leaving E, F, G & H for the card reader. I imagine 90% of network admins have set the users home area to default to H: which obviously causes a major problem when the user tries to log-in to a machine with a card reader. As a short term fix we have used a MS tool called devcon, which can disable devices from the command line. Ill post an update when we find a more long term solution.

Dell's Wonderful Utility Partition

If you have installed and configured a Dell Poweredge Server, you may have noticed a "utility" partition which exists on the system drive....in our our case on the RAID 1 mirror which is our system drive.

For reasons I wont go into, it was suggested that we remove the dell system partition. The Server is a 2008 build, where the partition simply shows up in Storage Management, but you are unable to edit or delete it from there.

Dell's solution was to rebuild the entire server including OS. Great....

I decided there must be a quicker way so had a little expriment with DISKPART. Diskpart is a command line tool which allows you to foricbly remove a partition. As long as you are not trying to force remove a partition within a dynamic disk, this is a fairly straight forward process and is supposed to leave the rest of the drive (or mirror) in tact.

To cut a long store short....dont use DISKPART to force remove a DELL utility partition, it doesnt work, and it will leave you having to rebuild all the data contained on the same drive. Considering the Dell Utility Partition only contains data which is on a normal Dell boot CD, I really cant see the point in it.