Out of Band Management aka Lights Out ala ALOM/LOM/iLO ?

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Out of Band Management aka Lights Out ala ALOM/LOM/iLO ?

I'm researching Xserve hardware for a project at work and am having a hard time finding out if these are real servers or not.

By real server I mean that an out of band lights out management facility is there. One which would allow you to connect via serial or network (preferred) to a service processor. The service processor would then let you power the machine on/off, change firmware settings to ie: boot from network on the next boot, or from disk 3 or what-have-you.

It should also give you access to the text console at a minimum once the os has loaded, and optionally let you see the gui (if there is any graphics adaptor installed).

Something akin to Sun's LOM or ALOM, or HP's iLO facilities.

If it isn't there, then this project isn't going to work with Xserves.

G4 PowerBook, Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Posted on Mar 29, 2007 4:33 PM

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Answer 1

Mar 29, 2007 6:00 PM in response to cyberdex

The Intel Xserves have LOM. However, it is fairly simplistic at the moment -- you connect over the network, and you can remotely power cycle the machine.

You cannot currently change firmware settings like the boot device (for example to NetBoot or to select a different boot device, perhaps with a different OS version).

So it's not as functional as Sun's LOM at the moment. Whether the ability to kick it remotely is sufficient, I can't say.

The access to LOM is done through the Server Monitor application, FWIW.

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Answer 2

cyberdex Author

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Mar 29, 2007 7:31 PM in response to William Lloyd

Thanks for the reply, it was helpful.

Being able to out-of-band programatically control the power and diddle the bios to specify a different boot method, using a standard protocol such as ssh, http, or ipmi is kind of key to the project.

We may be able to approximate a close enough solution by having ip-powerbars and always leaving the systems to boot from network first, with fail over to booting from hard disk if the network boot server does not respond in time.

Is that at least possible? Specify to always boot from network first, disk second, and by manipulating the imaging server we can either respond to a network boot request or be silent and let it spin up from hdd?

The goal is to be able to remote reinstall the operating system, under control of scripts on the imaging server. We can not rely on the systems being in a sane bootable state with working network stack in between imaging runs. Our environment is pretty unique, but the general out of band bare metal management concept seems like a fairly simple, basic requirement for servers.

You can't always count on asking a data centre monkey to press buttons and such on the front panel for you . . .

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Answer 3

cyberdex Author

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Mar 29, 2007 7:41 PM in response to cyberdex

Perhaps something like this http://www.realweasel.com/intro.html along with ip-powerbars will suffice. Anybody used a weasel or similar on an xserve?

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Answer 4

sheurich

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Apr 3, 2007 5:34 PM in response to cyberdex

Like you, I'm very familiar with Sun various LOM implementations. The ALOM is, IMHO, by far the most useful one [RSC supports telnet not SSH; eLOM is IPMI 2.0 like Apple but very clunky to work with in the CLI].

The IPMI BMC present in the Xserve has a ton of capabilities, including Serial-over-LAN (SOL) for remote console access, but most features are (currently) unused. Apple ships the open-source ipmitool, as does Sun on S10 x64 systems, but no man pages (sourceforge has them); I think this is telling about how much effort has been put in to the Lights Out capability so far. I have been able to remotely query the Xserve LOM using ipmitool (from a Sun box) for various environmental conditions and to simply power-on/off the box. The GUI Server Manager client has equivalent functionality.

While I can enable the SOL capability with ipmitool, I don't (yet) know how to connect for serial console access. One other point of frustration so far has been that the RS-232 console port on the Xserve is only used for getty to listen on; thus if the box is not fully booted, the console port does no good whatsoever.

Don't get me wrong though; we are slowly replacing our Sun equipment with Xserve systems, as they offer much greater capability and easier management (in general) at a significantly lower cost than Sun. I just wish Apple would fix some of the basic Lights Out functionality that we have come to expect.

Xserve Quad Xeon Mac OS X (10.4.9)

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