Pre-Assign Identifiers

jdjackson · ‎09-20-2023

Is it possible for Intersight to assign the needed identifiers from pools to new server profiles that have not been assigned to a server? What I am trying to accomplish is that I want to be able to assign IP addresses, IQN/WWPNs and other identifiers in a specific order without doing static assignemnets and not having to worry about which server booted up first or which profile deployed and got assigned first.

Brian Morrissey · ‎09-20-2023

When you create a server profile and do 'assign later' and then attach the LAN/SAN connectivity policies to the profile it should pull the identifiers from the pool as seen below

Everything will be pre-provisioned waiting for the physical server assignment to be specified at a later time. Is this the behavior you were looking for?

jdjackson · ‎09-20-2023

That is what I am looking for, and now that you say that, it does provision the UUID and WWPNs (if using fiber channel) but it does not provision the IQN (for iSCSI) or any IP (boot or IMC) address until the profile is activated on a server. At least no on my installations anyways.

Brian Morrissey · ‎09-21-2023

I'd recommend submitting feedback under the help icon in Intersight and just let them know you would like a way for all identifiers to be pre-provisioned from the pool when a profile is created (similar to the way WWPN, Mac, UUID behaves).

Other option which is a bit more involved is reserved identifiers which can only be done via API:
https://intersight.com/help/saas/features/servers/configure#server_id_pools

Basically you can create your pools, policies, profiles via UI and then create reserved identifiers and assign them to servers

Here's a basic example with the intersight powershell sdk on ensuring iqn.2023-01.naming-authority:44:5 initially gets initially assigned to profile briamorr_test2

#Get Organization
$org = Get-IntersightOrganizationOrganization -Name "default"
$orgMoRef = Initialize-IntersightMoMoRef -Moid $org.Moid -Objecttype ($org.ObjectType | Out-String)

#Get Existing IQN Pool
$pool = Get-IntersightIqnPoolPool -Name "briamorr_iqn"
$poolMoRef = Initialize-IntersightMoMoRef -Moid $pool.Moid -Objecttype ($pool.ObjectType | Out-String)

#Create Reservation in IQN Pool
$reservation = New-IntersightIqnpoolReservation -Identity "iqn.2023-01.naming-authority:44:5" -Organization $orgMoRef -Pool $poolMoRef 

#Get Reservation Info
$reservationRef = Initialize-IntersightPoolReservationReference -ReservationMoid $reservation.Moid -ObjectType "IqnpoolReservationReference" -ClassId "IqnpoolReservationReference" 

#Get Server Profile We Want To Attach Reservation To
$profile = Get-IntersightServerProfile -Name "briamorr_test2"

#Attach IQN Reservation
$profile | Set-IntersightServerProfile -ReservationReferences $reservationRef

jdjackson · ‎09-27-2023

Brian,
Do you have some documentation on using powershell with Intersight? I think this would be a great help for future implementations. I have found some documentation on it, but I haven't been able to connect powershell to my Intersight environment. All the documentation I found was how to connect to an onprem Intersight installation.

Brian Morrissey · ‎09-27-2023

I would recommend starting here:

https://github.com/CiscoDevNet/intersight-powershell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTZ9lMxwaLg

The steps should be the same for onprem vs SaaS the major difference being the BasePath as intersight.com for SaaS versus myintersightappliance.local for onprem.

If you have any issues connecting let us know where you are getting stuck at