Hello everyone, my name is Brian, and I am a Global Support Engineer with Dell who specializes in MX7000 and MX740c servers. Today, we are going to go over how to deploy a server template to an MX740c blade and what that looks like. We are on the landing page right now of a two-chassis group, and we are operating from the lead chassis. I am logged in as root with administrative privileges.
We’ll go to the 'Configuration' drop-down menu and select 'Templates'. In a previous video, I’ve already made an MX740c template. We’ll go ahead and select that now, and we can choose to deploy the template if we do not want to change any virtual network address settings. For the purposes of this video, we will associate it to a virtual network ID pool where we can assign MAC addresses and worldwide names as needed. You go ahead and select the identity pool with this drop-down. For the purposes here, we’ll select 'Test One', and we can also adjust the bandwidth if you have NPAR enabled.
You can define VLANs, both tagged and untagged. After you define your network settings for your template, you can go ahead and select 'Deploy Template' to determine which server you want to apply this to. For the purposes of this video, we are going to select 'Devices' and assign this to individual servers, but we will cover how to assign this to chassis slots in a later video. If you 'Select Sleds' and select the 'Server' option, it lists all the servers that you can apply templates to across your entire chassis group. We’re going to go ahead and select the MX740c server and hit 'Finish'.
The next option here is to define if we’re going to boot to a network ISO file. We can also define the network IP addresses for your iDRAC, either static or DHCP. This 'Target Attributes' is your last stop to ensure that you do not have any kind of unnecessary RAID options selected. Keep in mind, if you do overwrite your RAID, you will lose your operating system as well as any virtual disks defined. When you hit Next, you can reserve identities from the identity pool that you associated.
This will allow you to deploy virtual MAC addresses, and you can expand the individual ports to confirm which ones they are. Finally, you can either choose to run this now or enable it at a later time, preferably in a maintenance window, as this does require a reboot to apply. It will give you a final warning that you do have a chance to delete your operating system, and this will be a disruptive action. After this, you go ahead and hit 'Yes'. You get a popup stating that the deployment is successfully started. You can go to the 'Monitor', 'Job' section here to monitor the job in progress by hitting the 'View Details' page with the line item highlighted.
In the Details, Job Details page, you can select the job line item here and hit 'View Details' to view the individual tasks. This particular job is going to take about four to five minutes to apply, during which the server will be rebooting into the Lifecycle Controller and applying the various attributes. I’ll go ahead and pause it here and resume when we are closer to finished. Alright, and we’re back. Okay, so we are in the middle of deploying a server template to an MX740c server. The server has rebooted.
We were observing this in the iDRAC while it was happening. On reboot, the parameters were applied to the Lifecycle Controller. In the beginning, it asks the Lifecycle Controller if it is responding and is in good status. It sends the power down request, carries the job information to the Lifecycle Controller, and applies the different attributes. It also checks to make sure that the network information is associated with the server profile and template.
It does a validation check to make sure that the Lifecycle Controller is still in good standing, and then it cleans up the job, deletes the temporary files, and reboots. On reboot, it provides a final check, and all this took less than five minutes. Well, okay, five and a half minutes. So, that’s what it looks like as far as the job is concerned.
You get a completed line here stating “Deploy Template was successful.” You can go to the drop-down of Configuration to the Profile section where you can confirm that the template has been associated. Here’s our template name, and here is our target device. And that is it. This has been how to deploy a server template in an MX7000 chassis. Thank you for watching, and I hope this video was informative.
Have a good day.
