blade servers cloning?

[bonsky]

hello to all, just wanna check, is it possible to clone blade servers? from bay one to two and so on. Coz i need to install 14 blades and i dont want to wait to finish one at a time because of the constrainst of the internal cdrom. Any better idea how to make my installation faster?
thanks

 

[catorze]

Yes. External to the BladeCenter chassis, install and IBM Director Server and purchase Remote Deployment Manager. RDM is designed to deploy Operating Systems, especially to IBM hardware. From the IBM Director Console, you can discover the BladeCenter's Management Module, which will populate the Console with all the installed Blades. After performing a "Basic Scan" (RDM Task), you can capture a sysprepped image from a donor Blade, create a Clone Image of the captured image, and deploy it to the other Blades, or perform a Native unattended installation to all of them. RDM also can update BIOS, firmwares, etc. - all of this is from the console, without having to touch the Blades or the chassis, no diskettes either. Pretty cool stuff!

 

[Bernard74]

Spot on Catorze..

Some Vendor Blade's (such as NEC) come with Deployment manager free.

Not sure about IBM Blades.

regards

Bernard

 

[catorze]

RDM is not free, but well worth the money since you can push not only the OS, but BIOS/firmware updates too! If you're already comfortable with the IBM Director interface, RDM is a cake walk to use, and no one manages IBM servers as well as IBM does. In fact, with IBM Director's Event Action Plans, managing Compaq servers via SNMP, I find IBM Director manages Compaqs better than Insight Manager can. Just my two cents, but pretty awesome nonetheless!!!

 

[nuejimmy]

If you're on a Windows Active Dir. network, just set up RIS. It makes install really easy. Plus you can create an image with all services & applications pre-installed. You'll just need to add the Broadcom network drivers to the RIS image.