Hi
Just getting my first ever UCS blade ready for install, have about 60 more to go. Coming from an HP blades shop I can set the blade to boot from a desired device one time on next boot. This allows me to boot from a device of my choosing one time, I'll use that boot to load up a ESXi ISO for example. When ESXi is done installing (auto install, no user interaction), the HP server will go back to the normal boot order.
So in UCS, I've been using the boot policy of CD/DVD then Local Disk (these servers have RAID-1 disk). If I'm using the KVM this seems to work but when ESX reboots after installing and I'm at lunch it will automatically go into the install again, repeat, repteat. I think If I switch the boot order to Local Disk first then CD/DVD that issue would be fixed because the serer would boot to disk after the MBR/GPT is created on the local disk from the ESXi install.
But... I've just seen the vMedia Policy option that is letting me use NFS/CIFS/HTTP to connect to a network resource and pull down an install from ISO, directly from the CIMC, it works great (I"m using CIFS). Really cool! What I note about this is that the vMedia policy seems to keep the CIMC permanently connected to my CIFS server, even after many reboots. The source/dest ports have not changed and the CIFS session has not timed out. Is that expected? Will the CIFS connection to the CIFS server remain forever? Woudl the same permanent connection happen for HTTP, I'm thinking no.
Ben
