Hello everyone, my name is Brian, and I am a Global Support Engineer with Dell who specializes in the modular systems and the MX7000 chassis. Today, we are going to go over how to create a template from a reference device for this MX7000 chassis. In later videos, we’ll go ahead and show you how to apply that template to other devices. So first, we want to start with the landing page of your MX7000 chassis. In this setup, we have a two-chassis group, and we would want to navigate to the 'Configuration' drop-down up at the top and select 'Templates'.
Once we’re in the 'Templates' section here in the 'Configuration' section, we will have a drop-down for 'Create Template'. We want to select 'From Reference Device' so we can choose the server that we want to clone the settings from. When we choose 'From Reference Device', we get this little popup here. We want to give it a name; we’ll call this 'MX740c Prod Temp', and you can have an optional description. I’ll put 'For Production' and hit 'Next'. In this next screen here for the reference device, we select the device that we want to copy the settings from.
We want to keep in mind that if we’re going to go ahead and make a template for an MX740c, we want to apply that template to an MX740c. You will be able to apply it to an 840 or a non-similar blade, but you will get it completed with error messages more than likely because of the NIC configurations there. So once we have an MX740c selected that we want to copy settings from, go ahead and hit 'Finish', and we will determine which settings we want to copy under the 'Configuration Element' section. Here, there’s a couple of things that I would like to point out about this section.
One, most of these options are pretty self-explanatory. iDRAC' is going to be IPs and your user accounts for your iDRAC, as well as various settings and timeout settings that that encompasses. 'BIOS' is processors and memory settings. 'System' is going to be your system warranty information, power cap settings, backplane configuration settings. 'NIC' is MPAR and IP addresses. The 'Lifecycle Controller' is going to be your Lifecycle Controller-centric settings, as well as your Lifecycle Controller log settings. 'RAID' I want to highlight mainly because if you have this checked, it will overwrite your RAID configuration that exists on your end server that you would apply this to.
So if you already have operating systems and virtual disks created, you may want to uncheck this to avoid overwriting your hard work. I’m also going to go ahead and uncheck 'Event Filters' and your 'Fiber Channel' information just for the purposes of this video to make the job a little more streamlined. It’ll take a little bit over a minute for this to complete. Once you have your options selected, go ahead and hit 'Finish'. You get a 'Create Template Job Created Successfully' popup. If you want to go ahead and monitor the progress, you can go to the Monitor' and 'Job' section here, where you will be able to see the line item for your job, and you can hit 'View Details' with it highlighted.
Once we’re in the 'View Details' screen of this job, you can go ahead and select the job line item here, and this 'View Details' button allows you to see the individual tasks for a template creation. What happens is the Lifecycle Controller is communicated with the chassis and makes sure that it’s in a proper status, a responding status. Then it sends the target parameters to the Lifecycle Controller that it wants to copy, which in this case is iDRAC, BIOS, System, NIC, and Lifecycle Controller.
It will run the copy job, and it copies it to an XML-based file. You can see that the job cleans up itself from the queue and gives you the details of which server that it extracted it from, and it was about a minute and 7 seconds. So with that template created, you can also confirm this from the 'Configuration', Template' section, and ours is the last one. This is the one that we just made. So that is a video to cover the creation of a template from a reference device.
Thank you for watching, and I hope this video was informative. Have a good day.
