Hello, everyone. My name is Brian, and I am a global support engineer for modular systems, and I specialize in the MX7000 chassis.
Today, we are going to go over how to create a server template, and deploy it in a chassis running 1.20 Firmware. At the moment, we are at the landing page of a two-group chassis, and I am root with chassis administrative privileges.
What we want to do is start with the "Configuration", and go to the "Deploy" drop-down here. We can create a template from a reference device.
This is a non-interruptive process, and it pulls a "Lifecycle Controller" to copy the attributes. For the purposes of this video, we are going to slim this down to only "iDRAC", "BIOS", "System", and "Lifecycle Controller".
Actually, we'll take out "BIOS", we'll just do "iDRAC", System, "NIC", and "Lifecycle Controller". Bear in mind that if you do choose "RAID" you will overwrite your "RAID" controller of configuration and this could possibly lead to an operating system loss.
Once we have our elements selected, we can go ahead and select a device. For the purposes of this video, we will go ahead and copy the attributes from this particular MX740, and we will copy it to the 7CS2 MX740.
Once we have our device selected, we can hit "Finish". You'll have a little pop-up stating that a template job was created successfully.
If you would like to see the job running in action, you can go to the "Monitor" and "Jobs" section. From here, we can view "Details", and then we can view these details for the actual task details.
Creating a template is fairly quick. It probably takes about less than two minutes. I haven't technically timed it. But it pulls the "Lifecycle Controller" to make sure that it is responsive.
It sends the information that it wants to grab, it copies it, it creates an XML-based template, and then it extracts the template. All told, it looks like it's about less than a minute to create.
Once we have the template created, you can go back to the "Deploy" section and we have it here, and it also says "Completed".
If you want to take a look at the attributes in the template, you can select it, and hit "View Details" over here on the right. And you can see exactly which attributes you have copied into the template.
Unfortunately, with this 1.20 Firmware baseline, you're not able to edit these on the fly. Going forward in 1.30 you will be able to. The things that you can edit are the "Name" and the "Description". That's about it.
To deploy a template, you can, I'll do it from the profile or the template thing. You can select the "Test1" template that we just made.
You can either, at this time, edit network settings and associate it to an identity pool, or you can define your virtual identifiers like Virtual Max, Virtual Worldwide names.
You can also define "Teaming", "LACP", or "Other". And you can define what kind of "VLANs" that you have. You can only do one untagged "VLAN".
And you can also, if you have MPower enabled, define your bandwidth limit per partition. At this moment, we'll just go ahead and deploy this.
This is what it looks like. You can deploy it to either a "Slot" or a "Device". We'll go ahead and deploy it to a device. We have an MX740c server, so it's wise to deploy it to an MX740c server.
You can technically deploy it to 840cs, but you will get "completed with error" issues, most likely because the hardware is completely different.
Once you have your device selected, you want to hit "Finish". You do have additional options like "Editing" to allow a boot to a network ISO, if you were going to remotely install operating systems.
You can define the "iDRAC IP" address. At this point, we're just going to go ahead and leave it alone. And then finally, you can schedule it.
Now, deploying a template is an interruptive process. It requires the server to reboot into the "Lifecycle Controller" for it to apply.
So if they're in production, I highly recommend that they schedule an outage. At this point, we're just going to go ahead and hit "Run".
And it gives you a final warning stating that you could lose your operating system if you have "RAID" settings selected. You get another pop-up stating that the template deployment is submitted.
From here, we can go back to the "Monitor Jobs" section, and we can see the job in action. We also can, at this point, monitor the "iDRAC" of the target device, and you will be able to see it reboot, go into the "Lifecycle Controller".
So, it determines that the "Lifecycle Controller" is responsive. It sends a reboot request. It applies the attributes.
Because the two servers that we are copying have different "NIC" settings, different "NICs" altogether, one has a "Mellanox ConnectX-4", the other one has a "QLogic 41262", these attributes will not match.
But this is what it looks like when you're unable to apply attributes due to non-matching NICs. So, it'll attempt to deploy what it can, and it will list what it can't. Mostly, it's all NIC settings.
At the final end, it’ll say "Task Failed, Completed With Errors". Because it was able to apply some attributes, just not all of them, the NIC settings anyway.
And that's what it looks like when you do deploy a server template. I hope this was informative. If you have any kind of questions, please feel free to contact our global support engineers. We'd be happy to walk you through this process.
Thanks for watching.
