Onboard Administrator

How to connect to the Brocade SAN Switch Interconnect in the HP C7000 BladeSystem

So you’ve just bought your new HP C7000 BladeSystem and you have some Brocade SAN switches plugged into the interconnect bays in the back. You’ve already racked the BladeSystem and now you’re ready to configure things.

You go to the back to find a console port to connect to but notice that there’s nothing there. Now how the heck do you connect to the switches? Through the Onboard Administrator of course! HP’s Onboard Administrator (OA) manages everything to do with your BladeSystem. By connecting to the OA you can connect to the SAN switch to manage it.

Here’s how you do it:

First, open up a command prompt window and then telnet to the IP address of the OA. Login with your username and password and that should take you to the command line of the OA. Then type in “connect interconnect 3″ (if the bay number your SAN switch in is 3, put in whatever bay number you have your interconnect plugged into). At this point it will connect you through to the SAN switch.

Then you can login to the SAN switch with the default username and password and then use the command IPADDRSET to set the ip address for the switch to respond to. Then you can connect to the switch via the web interface on that IP to further continue your configuration.

-RP

Onboard Administrator failing in HP BladeSystem

So here’s a little issue you might run into with an HP C7000 BladeSystem. In this scenario you have two Onboard Administrators which manage the Blade enclosure and all of it’s components. One is an active OA (Onboard Administrator) and one is passive.

You try to power on one of the blades and you get a power error and the red light flashes on front of the blade. You login to the OA and you see that everything is not good. There is a critical error with the power subsystem. You then check the enclosure info on the LCD and it tells you the other OA is the active one. Now that’s strange because the one you’re connected to thinks it’s the active one. How do you fix this?

Pull the bad OA, and call HP support and have it replaced. When you put the new OA in everything should go back to normal. Basically I had a bad OA that thought the power subsystem was not working but that wasn’t the case, it was the OA that was the issue.

Once the OA was replaced, all the blades powered up fine. Hope this helps!

-Cheers, RP