[CentOS] IBM BladeCenter HS20 blades

[John Burk]

I have 60 HS20's running CentOS 3.4, but I do the install via the xcat 
toolset over nfs.

Have you looked at xcat yet to manage the os on your blades?  Well worth 
the time to setup, written primarily by IBM, and free.

http://www.xcat.org/

BTW, what processors are in your blades?  I'm running the 3.2GHz 
Nocona's, if your are similar you'll probably need to use these kernel 
parameters in your grub.conf:

    acpi=noirq noexec=off noapic

And if you do go with nfs installs via xcat, the tg3 driver in 3.4 is 
broken.  E-mail me and I'll send you the work-around.  It's already in 
xcat but it takes a bit of finesse to apply the fix.

John Burk

Sr. Technical Director
Mainframe Entertainment

604.628.1019




Brendon Colby wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> We have purchased an IBM BladeCenter and I am in the process of 
> testing Linux installation on these things (boot off SAN i.e. qla2300 
> driver, not using internal drives). My distro of choice is Debian, 
> however, since I'm really not interested in trying to hand compile all 
> the drivers, I decided to try CentOS (which I'm so far very impressed 
> with).
>
> On boot, as with the Debian Sarge disk, the CDROM disappears. The 
> installation media complains that it cannot find the CD. I'm testing 
> using the DVD ISO of CentOS 4. Has anyone been successful in getting 
> CentOS 3/4 installed on a BladeCenter server? I noticed back in 11/04 
> there were a few posts on it.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Brendon Colby
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