26Jun Some cool new hardware

I work in a pretty geeky team. As part of our daily work we have to work on some relatively high-spec hardware from a whole lot of different vendors, one of whom is the internationally-recognised Hewlett-Packard.

Lately I’ve had the opportunity to install some of Hewlett-Packard’s newest range of blade infrastructure hardware - the HP c-Class blade system. This is the HP’s latest offering in the high-density line of infrastructure hardware that moves away from the traditional rack-mounted way of thinking. To quickly sum up what blade systems mean I would say … well … it’s squashing up to 16 servers where you’d previously only been able to put around 5 rack-mounted servers of the same spec. So yeah, it’s pretty cool stuff.

One of the “gotchas” I ran into was what to do when your remote site doesn’t have access to a DHCP server for a period of time. Ours was down for maintenance and I needed to get some servers up and running so I made use of what HP calls “Enclosure Bay IP Addressing” or EBIPA. This allows you to specify a range of IP addresses that automatically get assigned sequentially to your blade servers’ iLO management modules. iLO, for those that haven’t used it before, stands for “Integrated Lights Out” and is HP’s method of remotely managing hardware without having to physically be at a site and without having to install any additional software on your servers. Very useful.

So anyway, without DHCP I assigned a range of addresses to the blade enclosure slots, got the servers onto temporary IP addresses and was then able to connect to each one and assign the appropriate addresses from our management VLAN. This is a good thing to know about if you’re stuck without DHCP when configuring your c-Class blade kit.

If you have the chance to redesign your existing server infrastructure I can highly recommend the HP BladeSystem. While there is nearly always a higher level of initial capex required to get the base hardware in place it’s an excellent way of making sure that adding more servers later is quick and easy. Combined with HP’s Rapid Deployment Pack and iLO, we’ve got rolling new servers into production down to a very short time instead of the entire day that a new server build used to take.