In my new laboratory, I have inherited the administration of a very-badly-previously-configured Dell Poweredge M1000e chassis, with 9 M610 blades installed. The chassis is intended to be used for HPC computing. The idea is to have a master blade which can be accessed from the university lan, and the other blades are in an internal network on the chassis and used as computing slaves, used by the master through a scheduler.
To take the control of the chassis management controller (CMC) I had to manually remove it from the chassis and connect the reset jumper (hardware reset).
Now I have taken the control of the CMC, and I have performed firmware update for CMC (to v 4.50) and IDRAC6 of the blades (to v. 3.5) trough CMC web interface. The problem is that I cannot connect to the IDRAC interface (neither console) of the blades. I guess the problem is related to the networking configuration (which is not configured on that chassis).
I would like someone to help me in configuring the IDRAC network settings knowing that:
1) I do not have administrator priviledges on the laboratory network, and that I cannot rely on the support of the IT of the university (which owns the network).
2) I have only 2 IP to access the chassis on the university LAN: the CMC interface and the master-blade IP address. both are in the same logical network with this configuration (please understand that I keep hidden the network part of the external IPs):
CMC : IP x.y.z.120 NM 255.255.255.128 GW x.y.z.126
master : IP x.y.z.1 NM 255.255.255.128 GW x.y.z.126
Open questions:
- the VLAN feature of the M1000e is off, it is not clear to me if I should enable it to access IDRAC
- If I cannot ask for new IPs to the university, should I use one of the blades as proxy to access the IDRAC interfaces? If yes, How should I configure the internal lan of the chassis?
- Ideally, the master blade should be able to perform IPMI requests to power up and down the blades to scale the resources (this feature will by controlled by the scheduler).
- I don't know how the guy who installed the OS on the blades (3 years ago) could do it, knowing that IDRAC has apparently newer worked? Mystery...
What I have already tried:
- I have tried to use one external free static address (x.y.z.121, GW and NM as master), if I give this address to a blade server (on eth1) it can access the university lan and I can ping it from the master. But if in the Web interface of the CMC I give this address to IDRAC interface of one of the blades, I cannot ping it over the network (neither from master). I guess this is related to the fact that VLAN is not activated on the chassis?
- I have tried to assign it an IP in the same logical network as the internal blades network (which is 10.1.1.0/24) but this does not work too.
If someone here has a configuration example, or any idea to help me reducing my headache, I would be extremely grateful to him/her for any help.
Kind regards
PS: I feel really disoriented with the way the poweredge M1000e connects the blades and the different IO modules together. I really feel there is a sort of greyish catchall for any IO at hardware level, which I don't completely get...
EDIT: parenthesis: Dell has released a new idrac software update last night, so now the version is 3.60.
edit2: actually the update is not working on a few blades, and I don't know why. I'll check with Dell support for the update.
edit 3: dell support (France) tells that v_3.60 is apparently not yet officially supported by them. Anyway, I will need to obtain external addresses from the IT of the university to access the IDRAC interfaces. Let's see if I can get some...
Edit 4: finally I have obtained static IPs from our IT. I have configured them in the IDRAC settings of the CMC, but when I try to ping them nothing seems to happen. Is it a problem with the enable lan option for idrac, or maybe something related to the VLAN that is not configured?
