We have taken delivery of a bunch off Dell Poweredge Rack servers. Unfortunately when ordering it was neglegted to ask for dhcp to be enabled in the built in iDRAC controlers… So they are all stuck on the same IP address.
Which means that I'll have to go to each of them individually and configure a new IP in the console…
In the future I want to avoid that. Now Dell proposes to deliver the next batch with auto discovery enabled. As I understand this means that when the machine wakes up for the first time the iDRAC will request a DHCP address. The DHCP server then supposedly also provides a "provisioning" server, that provides it with a username and password, and a configuration to be applied. This would allow us to for example configure things like RAID automatically.
However, I can't seem to find a way to set up such a provisioning server that does not involve setting up a windows machine. I want to use Linux tools exclusively.
Is there a way to do this? I want to just rack servers, switch them on, and then do everything remotely. And that using only linux tools?
Best Answer
Why start with the DRACs at all? Dell can ship servers with a preconfigured RAID setup, so all you need is autodeploy an OS on all of them (kickstart/pxe/foreman/whatever you prefer), and then configure the DRACs locally using
racadmwhen you have an OS already running on the hosts. That, in turn, can also be automated using Puppet/Chef/Ansible/Salt/etc