Declaring the blade in Ansible

The blade is declared as a normal host in the inventory. It also needs be added to the supermicro_microblade_blades group.

This group list all blades which are going to be configured:

• in the CMM: name and IPMI settings
• on the switches: ports names and ports <-> VLANs associations

Blade Definition

A few settings are needed to guide the Ansible playbook to compute the settings.

Here is an example you would store in host_vars/<bladename>/blade.yml:

blade:
  pos: "A2"
  ipmi:
    ip: 172.24.31.21

Here is an example you would store in host_vars/<bladename>/net.yml:

net:
  ifaces:
    eth0:
      untagged_vlan: "OSCI-Provisioning"
    eth1:
      untagged_vlan: "OSCI-Provisioning"
    eth2:
      untagged_vlan: "OSCI-Public"
      tagged_vlans: ["OSCI-Management", "OSCI-Internal"]
    eth3:
      untagged_vlan: "OSCI-Public"
      tagged_vlans: ["OSCI-Management", "OSCI-Internal"]

The bladename is used to define the hostname.

pos is the name of the blade slot (position on the chassis), to help locate it in case of problem.

ipmi defines IPMI access. ip is the IP on the OSCI-Management VLAN. The other parameters are used to setup the administrator and operator credentials. The administrator account is used by OSCI to manage the blade and parameters are defined in group_vars/catatonic/blade.vault.yml. The operator account may be defined to allow a tenant to have limited access to control the blade power and status; if the blade in also part of a tenant with such settings, then you would find the parameters in group_vars/tenant_<tenantname>/blade.vault.yml.

ifaces defines how network interfaces on the blade will be connected to the outside world, through the microblade network switches. For each interface you wish configured, you can define one untagged_vlan and a list of 802.1q tagged_vlans. If an interface is skipped, then no configuration will be made for it. Presently the playbook is unable to know how many interfaces are available (this could probably be done using the list of MACs, see playbooks/network_setup.yml) and the interfaces’ names can be renamed, so you need to be careful when filing these information.

If eth<i> interface names are not used, then the interface index, the order interfaces are physically mapped and connected to the internal switch, need to be specified. The default with eth interfaces is defined in group_vars/supermicro_microblade_blades_catatonic/net.yml but you can override it per-host or by creating a new Ansible group. This information is needed to map interfaces to the switch ports and generate the switch configuration.

To allow a blade to access the PXE for installing it easily, you need to setup one of its interfaces into the OSCI-Provisioning VLAN (untagged). Beware all interfaces cannot boot on PXE (usually the first one on a switch does ; which means eth0 on switch A1 and eth1 on switch A2 for a MBI-6128R-T2 for eg.).

Updating Hardware Configuration

First Time / Admin Password Modification

If the blade was never configured, then the administrator password is not yet set to the team settings, so we need to notify the playbook about it. In this case the old password is ADMIN.

If you want to modify the password, then change the setting group_vars/catatonic/blade.vault.yml.

The old/original password then needs to be set in the OLD_IPMI_ADM_PWD environment variable.

For a newly configured blade you would then do:

OLD_IPMI_ADM_PWD=ADMIN ansible-playbook --diff -l <bladename> -t cmm_blade_setup playbooks/supermicro_microblade_config.yml

You can now proceed to the rest of the changes in the following section.

Usual Changes

When settings are ready, just fire the playbook:

 ansible-playbook --diff playbooks/supermicro_microblade_config.yml

You can fire only steps using these tags:

• cmm_blade_setup: configure settings on the CMM
• sw_conf_gen: generate the switches configuration files on Catton’s TFTP directory (but do not touch the switches)
• sw_conf_apply: load the last-generated configuration on the switches and reboot (or exclude tag sw_reboot to skip reboot)