{"id":282,"date":"2010-10-19T17:46:13","date_gmt":"2010-10-19T23:46:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benincosa.com\/blog\/?p=282"},"modified":"2014-11-19T11:25:59","modified_gmt":"2014-11-19T17:25:59","slug":"using-the-hp-array-configuration-utility-cli-for-linux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/?p=282","title":{"rendered":"Using the HP Array Configuration Utility CLI for Linux"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week I took part in an installation where we got a large amount of HP BL460c G6 blades sent to us.\u00a0 One of the daunting tasks was to configure the RAID.\u00a0 The normal thing I see is people waiting for the BIOS to pop up, press F8 or some other trickery of keystrokes to finally get to the RAID menu and configure it.\u00a0 I’m cool doing this one time.\u00a0 I might even do this two times.\u00a0 But at some point a man has got to define a limit to doing mundane repetitive tasks that are better done by computers.<\/p>\n

A good guy I know is a dude named Johnny.\u00a0 He pointed me to this link of the hpacucli<\/a>.\u00a0 I still don’t know how he found the link.\u00a0 His google-foo is better than mine I suppose.<\/p>\n

This program can be installed on a Linux machine and then the RAID can be configured.\u00a0 But you’re telling me:\u00a0 ‘Chicken and Egg problem!’ How do you run a program on the OS to configure the RAID when you need an OS installed on the RAID to run the program?\u00a0 Simple:\u00a0 You netboot the machines with a stateless image so that the OS is in memory and doesn’t require hard drives.\u00a0 Too bad for you that you probably don’t have xCAT<\/a>.\u00a0 Cause I do, and I use it without reservation.\u00a0 And since I have it, it took me 5 minutes to create a stateless image that booted up on the servers. (I’ll tell you how to do that at the end of this little writeup).<\/p>\n

Once the machine booted up I ran the command to get the status:<\/p>\n

# hpacucli ctrl slot=0 logicaldrive all show status<\/pre>\n
Probably nothing happening since I haven’t done anything yet.\u00a0 So I took at a look at the physical drives:<\/p>\n
# hpacucli ctrl slot=0 pd all show\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\r\n\r\nSmart Array P410i in Slot 0 (Embedded)\r\n\r\n unassigned\r\n\r\n physicaldrive 1I:1:1 (port 1I:box 1:bay 1, SAS, 146 GB, OK)\r\n physicaldrive 1I:1:2 (port 1I:box 1:bay 2, SAS, 146 GB, OK)<\/pre>\n
So then I just made a RAID1 on those disks:<\/p>\n
# hpacucli ctrl slot=0 create type=ld drives=1I:1:1,1I:1:2 raid=1<\/pre>\n
I rebooted the blade into ESXi4.1 kickstart and all was bliss.\u00a0 But then I got even more gnarley.\u00a0 I didn’t want to log into each blade and run that command.\u00a0 So \u00a0 I used xCAT’s psh to update them all:<\/p>\n
# psh vhost004-vhost048 'hpacucli ctrl slot=0 create type=ld drives=1I:1:1,1I:1:2 raid=1'<\/pre>\n
Boom!\u00a0 Instant RAID.\u00a0 Now check them:<\/p>\n
# psh vhost003-vhost048 'hpacucli ctrl slot=0 logicaldrive all show status'\r\nvhost003: \r\nvhost003:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 logicaldrive 1 (136.7 GB, RAID 1): OK\r\nvhost003: \r\nvhost005: \r\nvhost005:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 logicaldrive 1 (136.7 GB, RAID 1): OK\r\nvhost005: \r\nvhost004: \r\nvhost004:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 logicaldrive 1 (136.7 GB, RAID 1): OK\r\nvhost004:\r\n...<\/pre>\n
I’ve used this technique with IBM blades in the past as well.\u00a0 Now all my blades are installed with ESXi 4.1 and I didn’t have to wait through any nasty BIOS boot up menus.\u00a0 I’ve also automated this in the past by sticking this script in the<\/p>\n
xCAT image creation for HP 460c G6<\/h2>\n
This is fairly easy.\u00a0 First, create or modify the \/opt\/xcat\/share\/xcat\/netboot\/centos\/compute.pkglist so that it looks like this:<\/p>\n
bash\r\nnfs-utils\r\nopenssl\r\ndhclient\r\nkernel\r\nopenssh-server\r\nopenssh-clients\r\nbusybox-anaconda\r\nwget\r\nrsync\r\nlibgcc.i386\r\nlibgcc.x86_64\r\nlibstdc++.x86_64\r\nlibstdc++.i386<\/pre>\n
Next, run ‘genimage’.\u00a0 The trick with the HP Blades is to add the ‘bnx2x’ driver.\u00a0 Once you’re done with this, install the hpacucli RPM in the stateless image:<\/p>\n
# rpm -Uivh hpacucli-8.60-8.0.noarch.rpm -r \/install\/netboot\/centos5.5\/x86_64\/compute\/rootimg<\/pre>\n
Once this is done, run:<\/p>\n
# packimage -p compute -a x86_64 -o centos5.5<\/pre>\n
Then a simple:<\/p>\n
# nodeset vhost001 netboot=centos5.5-x86_64-compute\r\n# rpower vhost001<\/pre>\n
will install the nodes to this image.\u00a0 That’s it, then you can run the commands above to get the RAID set up.<\/p>\n
Bonus points:\u00a0 Then install ESXi 4.1 with xCAT.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
hpacucli, bl460c g6,configure raid,xCAT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[94,986,916],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=282"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2806,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282\/revisions\/2806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}