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 HP Integrity BL860c Server Blade Linux Installation White Paper: Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

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This section describes the following optional activities that you may choose to employ in administering your HP Integrity servers:

Configuring the PXE Environment

This section describes how to create and configure a PXE environment to enable network booting and installing of Linux and is specific to HP Integrity systems.

The basic PXE boot process is as follows:

  • The PXE firmware broadcasts a DHCP discovery packet on the network

  • Upon receiving the DHCP discovery packet, the DHCP server negotiates with the client to ultimately issue an IP address lease, determined by the DHCP configuration, and the path to a startup file on the TFTP server.

  • The client then downloads and executes the startup file.

A PXE/DHCP and TFTP server must be set up to host the Linux boot loader, boot loader configuration file, kernel image, and initial RAM disk image. Install and configure your PXE/DHCP and TFTP server using its corresponding documentation. The boot loader for Linux on HP Integrity servers (including the BL860c server blade) is elilo.efi and is found on the OS distribution installation media (the steps for retrieving files from the Linux distribution media are provided in this section). Additionally, it is available from the :

http://sourceforge.net/projects/elilo

The elilo.efi boot loader retrieves the elilo.conf configuration file. This file indicates where to retrieve the Linux installation boot kernel and the initrd image file containing the initial memdisk file system. The elilo.efi boot loader then loads the kernel and initrd image and executes the kernel. When started with DHCP, elilo on HP Integrity servers attempts to download its configuration file by trying several names in the following order (described in the netbooting.txt file delivered with the elilo source):

  • AABBCCDD.conf

    where:

    AABBCCDD is the hexadecimal representation of the assigned IP address and must be upper case characters.

  • AA[BB[CC[]-ia64.conf

    where:

    AABBCC is the hexadecimal representation of the first 3 octets, or subnet, of the assigned IP address.

  • elilo-ia64.conf (commonly used)

  • elilo.conf

The elilo-ia64.conf file contains basic configuration information and an entry for each available kernel image as in the following example:

# Sample elilo-ia64.conf file
chooser=textmenu
message=main.msg
prompt
timeout=10
image=images/RHEL4u4/vmlinuz
        label=netinst-rhel4u4
        description="Install RHEL4u4 Release"
        initrd=images/RHEL4u4/initrd
        read-only
        append="askmethod ramdisk_size=12288 maxcpus=1"
image=images/SLES10/vmlinuz
        label=nfsinst-sles10
        description="Install SLES10 Release"
        initrd=images/SLES10/initrd
        append="ramdisk_size=131072"

In this example, elilo will draw a selection menu listing the available boot images identified by their description fields, Install RHEL4U4 Release and Install SLES10 Release, This menu will include color attributes, a message (as contained in the file specified in the message field), a menu, and prompt field for entering kernel parameters. For more details, see the textmenu_chooser.txt documentation provided with the elilo source code.

After selection of one of the boot images, elilo uses tftp to retrieve the kernel image identified in the image field and the initrd file identified in the initrd field, which is located relative to the directory from which elilo was retrieved. The kernel is then started with any kernel parameters specified in the append field of the elilo.conf configuration file or provided by the user.

The elilo.efi, vmlinuz, and initrd files are copies of the boot loader, boot kernel, and initial file system from the Linux distribution media. The boot loader, boot kernel, and initrd image are stored in an ISO image on the Linux distribution media.

To extract these files perform the following steps:

  1. Make the OS distribution media or ISO image available by choosing the appropriate method from the following:

    Using Physical Media:

    1. Load the OS distribution media into the DVD drive (or make it available using vMedia).

    2. Mount the OS distribution, enter:

      # mount /media/dvdrom

    3. Change directories to the loop-back directory, enter:

      # cd /media/dvdrom/

    Using an ISO Image:

    1. Loop-back mount the ISO image using the following commands:

      # mkdir /tmp/distroImage

      # mount -o loop /path/to/ISO \

      /tmp/distroImage

    2. Change directories to the loop-back directory, enter:

      # cd /tmp/distroImage

  2. Create a directory to loop-back mount the boot image file from the distribution media then mount it by entering the following commands:

    # mkdir /tmp/loopmount

    RHEL4U4:

    # mount -o loop images/boot.img /tmp/loopmount

    SLES10:

    # mount -o loop boot/ia64/image /tmp/loopmount

    # mount -o loop boot.img /tmp/loopmount

  3. From the loop-back mounted boot image, copy the boot loader, boot loader configuration file (if desired), boot image, and initrd image to the root directory of the TFTP server.

    # cd /tmp/loopmount/efi/boot

    # cp bootia64.efi /path/to/TFTP/root/elilo.efi

    # cp elilo.conf /path/to/TFTP/root/

  4. Copy the boot image and initrd image to the images/RHEL4u4|SLES10 directory relative to the root directory of the TFTP server.

  5. Unmount the loopmount directory with the following commands:

    # cd

    # umount /tmp/loopmount

Scripting Linux Installations for Large Deployments

HP Rapid Deploy Pack (RDP) 3.50 and HP SmartSetup Scripting Tookit (SSTK) 2.5 provide you the means to script network-based RHEL4U4 installations for environments with large numbers of systems. All supported features of RDP and SSTK are available to BL860c server blades in BladeSystem c-Class enclosures that do not use the Ethernet Pass-Thru Interconnect Module for network connections (for example, chassis-based switch modules).

Scripted RHEL4U4 installations will not work when the server blade is using the Ethernet Pass-Thru Interconnect Module because of the issue with the tg3 driver that is distributed with RHEL4U4. Alternatively, the image deployment features of RDP and SSTK to a server blade over the Ethernet Pass-Thru Interconnect Module does work. Image deployment requires that RHEL4U4 be manually installed first, as described in the previous sections, on the reference target server from which an image is captured. The captured image can then be deployed to other server blades. For further details regarding RDP and SSTK, see the HP Integrity Essentials Total Integrity Server Management Web site at:

http://www.hp.com/go/integrityessentials



Installing Linux
  		 


Appendix A: Instructions for Installing a New tg3 Driver for Ethernet Pass-Thru Interconnect Module Users  
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