Adventures of a Small Time OpenStack Sysadmin Chapter 009 - Prepare OpenStack hosts 1, 2, 3

Adventures of a Small Time OpenStack Sysadmin relate the experience of converting a small VMware cluster into two small OpenStack clusters, and the adventures and friends I made along the way.

Adventures of a Small Time OpenStack Sysadmin Chapter 009 - Prepare OpenStack hosts 1, 2, 3

Today was BIOS prep day and a hardware checklist.

Here's how to enable network UEFI PXE boot on a SuperMicro SYS-E200-8D aka X10SDV using a pretty standard Netboot.XYZ and ISC-DHCPD installation.

First, note that PXE boot mostly does not do VLAN tagging without "much extra effort" so you need a simple access port, even if the eventual network design is all LAG-bonded together and VLAN-trunking-tagged up.

In the BIOS config screen after booting:

"Advanced" "PCIe/PCI/PnP Configuration" area:

"Onboard LAN OPROM" set to EFI

"Onboard Video OPROM" set to EFI

"Network Stack" set to Enabled

"Ipv4 PXE Support" set to Enabled

"Boot" area:

"Boot Mode Select" set to UEFI

Set the boot orders to UEFI Hard Disk then UEFI Network.

Depending on BIOS version there may be some option you can set along the lines of "UEFI NETWORK drive priorities" where you can push netboot to work off the second 1G ethernet interface instead of timing out on the first 1G interface, or you could just plug the cable into the first interface...

Anyway, save configs, reboot, hit F12 for a netboot.

Its nerve-wrackingly incredibly slow, like a five to ten minute process from turning on in the IPMI KVM to a Netboot-XYZ menu prompt... but it does eventually work.  As I've often noted, computers only get slower over time.  This is not like booting MS-DOS 3.3 from a 360K floppy drive back in '84 which only took about five seconds.  Computers only get slower as technology "progresses".

I like to boot the system rescue CD provided by Netboot.XYZ and run "memtester 93000M" or so (depends how much memory you have, LOL).  All the classic old programs for burnin testing like Memtest86+ require old fashioned pre-UEFI booting and AFAIK there are no FOSS UEFI compatible burnin tools anymore, which is sad.  None the less I ran memory tests and other tests to verify the hardware is good.

Here's a checklist for hardware work required before OS installation:

Update all the physical labels; chassis, cables, everything.

Change the IPMI hostname in "configuration" "network" "hostname"

Update the BIOS as per the above notes to PXE netboot off the "new" Netboot.XYZ infrastructure.

Test the Netboot.XYZ and use the opportunity to run various hardware burnin or stress tests to verify memory is working, CPU fan can handle 100% CPU use, etc.

Add everything in Netbox ranging from machine name to interface configurations and IP addresses.

Update all the DNS entries forward and reverse for all the interfaces in ActiveDirectory.  Which in my case is a Samba cluster, so its just a shell script full of samba-tool lines.

At the end of this hardware checklist everything should be as ready as possible for "bare metal" OS installation.

Stay tuned for the next chapter!