Learn More About Creating Hardware Profiles
Use hardware profiles to develop models of properly-configured servers to be used in the IT environment; for example, application, database, Active Directory, DNS, enterprise security, and any other type of server.
The profile defines the hardware and storage settings required to configure a server.
Using a "reference server," the Management Plug-In can extract server settings and build a hardware profile. Profiles can be cloned, which allows you to reuse the existing hardware profile information on a target system; the settings are applied as appropriate and variations in BIOS settings are handled gracefully as BIOS configuration errors can halt a deployment task. Using the customize mode, this problem can be avoided by setting the attributes to match valid attributes on the target system.
NOTE: For systems that have iDRAC Express, the iDRAC configuration cannot be extracted and therefore should not be used as a reference server. If it is used as a target system, then no iDRAC configuration from the reference server will be applied.
Before creating a hardware profile, the following BIOS setting must be enabled:
A hardware profile contains:
Using a "reference server," the Management Plug-In can extract server settings and build a hardware profile. Profiles can be cloned, which allows you to reuse the existing hardware profile information on a target system; the settings are applied as appropriate and variations in BIOS settings are handled gracefully as BIOS configuration errors can halt a deployment task. Using the customize mode, this problem can be avoided by setting the attributes to match valid attributes on the target system.
NOTE: For systems that have iDRAC Express, the iDRAC configuration cannot be extracted and therefore should not be used as a reference server. If it is used as a target system, then no iDRAC configuration from the reference server will be applied.
Before creating a hardware profile, the following BIOS setting must be enabled:
- Collect System Inventory On Restart (CSIOR) must be enabled and the server restarted to provide accurate inventory and configuration information. See Setting CSIOR on clone server for more information.
NOTE: The Management Plug-In enables certain BIOS settings under the Processor group in the BIOS on all deployed servers, regardless of the settings on the reference server.
A hardware profile contains:
- Boot Order - Boot device sequence, hard drive sequence which can be edited only if the boot mode is set to BIOS
- BIOS Settings - Memory, processor, SATA, integrated devices, serial communications, embedded server management, power management, system security, and miscellaneous settings
- iDRAC Settings - Network, user list, and user configuration (IPMI/iDRAC privileges)
- RAID Configuration - defaults to creating RAID1 on the integrated controller's first two drives that can be used in a RAID1 configuration, and a dedicated hot-spare if a candidate drive meeting the criteria exists.
Related Topics
View or download Dell virtualization documentation at: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/eslvmwre/
View or download Dell hardware documentation for PowerEdge Servers
View or download Dell hardware documentation for PowerEdge Servers