Back in August 2008, I had a one-week “quick start” professional services engagement in Nutley New Jersey. It was a supposed to be a super simple week: install HP Server Automation at BT Global. Another ProServe engineer was onsite to setup HP Network Automation. Life was gonna be easy-peasy – the only deliverable was to …
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Tag:hpsa
a smart[ish] dhcpd
After running into some wacky networking issues at a recent customer engagement, I had a brainstorm about a smart[ish] DHCPd server that could work in conjunction with DNS and static IP assignment to more intelligently fill subnet space. Here’s the scenario we had: Lab network space is fairly-heavily populated with static assigned addresses – in …
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defaulting pxe boots with hpsa 10.0
In follow-up to my last post, which itself was a commentary on an earlier topic, I have the additional steps you need to do the previous procude (which is to edit /opt/opsware/boot/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default): /etc/init.d/opsware-sas stop smartboot Edit file. /etc/init.d/opsware-sas start smartboot
pxe works differently in hpsa 10.x
2 years ago I wrote-up how you can change the default choice for the PXE menu in HP Server Automation. Found out this week that those instructions are not valid if you are running 10.0 (release this past summer). HP changed how they present their PXE menu with 10.x, and I have filed an RFE …
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call
I learned about the call command in Windows recently. Some context – was trying to run a command via HPSA at a customer, but kept getting an error that the program was not a recognized internal or external command. Very frustrating. Then one of the guys I worked with suggested adding a “call” to the …
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certifications and dependencies
Last week I participated in a beta class for HP’s new Cloud Service Automation 3.0 product release (ok, so it’s a prerelease, and “product” is a strong term). 3.0 is a full rewrite from 2.x, so there is no upgrade path. Also, not everything that “appears” to be in place OOB is actually working – …
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automation
I have been deeply involved in data center management and automation for well over 5 years. Most companies still view automation the Wrong Way™, though – and it’s a hard mindset to change. Automation is NOT about reducing your headcount, or reducing hiring. Automation is used to: improve the efficiency of business tasks improve employee productivity reduce human …
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automatically returning a host to the unprovisioned server pool in hpsa
In conjunction with the customized PXE process I wrote about previously, it could be highly desirable to be able to return a server to the unprovisioned server pool in HP’s Server Automation. This is a specifically-Linux procedure: though I’m sure something similar can be done with Windows*. run an ad-hoc script against a target server that …
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storage strategies – part 4
Last time I talked about storage robustifiers. In the context of a couple applications with which I am familiar, I want to discuss ways to approach balancing storage types and allocations. Storage Overview Core requirements of any modern server, from a storage standpoint, are the following: RAM swap Base OS storage OS/application log storage Application …
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binding your mounts
Over the past several years, I have grown quite fond of the ability to do bind mounts on Linux. First, a little background. Most applications have specific directory structure requirements. Many have wildly varying space requirements depending on how a given install is utilized. For example, HPSA can use anywhere from 40-400-4000 gigabytes of space …
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