- Assign BMCs to servers

# Assign BMCs to servers

Contents

This section uses the Intelligent Management Platform Interface (IPMI) and associates baseboard management controllers (BMCs) with servers to support high availability.

Note: This section is for configuring managed storage servers, as previously set up in Add storage servers. This section does not apply to servers that are monitor-only.

Note: A server cannot be associated with both a BMC and PDU outlets. Use PDUs or BMCs to support failover.

## Issues Regarding Power Loss to the BMC or PDU

Regarding failover, if the method of power control is not functioning (e.g., loss of power to the fencing device, misconfiguration, etc.), HA will be unable to fail the targets from the failed server to its failover server. This is because in order to complete failover, the failover server must be able to guarantee that the failed server can no longer access targets running on it. The only way to be sure this is true is to remove power from the failed server. Thus, the failover server must be able to communicate with the fencing device of the failed server for failover to occur successfully.

With IPMI, the power for each HA server and its fencing device is coupled together. Accordingly, there are more scenarios where both may lose power at once (chassis power failure, motherboard failure, etc.). If a server suffers chassis power failure such that the BMC is not operational, HA will be unable to fail the targets over. The remedy in this situation is to restore power to the chassis of the failed server to restore the functionality of your file system. If HA coverage for the scenarios just described is important to you, we strongly recommend using smart PDUs, rather than IPMI as your fencing device.

Power loss to a PDU will mean that HA will be unable to fail the targets over. As in the above situation, the remedy is to restore power to the PDU to restore the functionality of your file system. We recommend redundant PDUs if availability is critical.

This approach is a necessary limit of HA to protect the integrity of the targets being failed over.

To associate BMCs with servers:

1. | At the menu bar, click the Configuration drop-down menu and click Power Control.

2. | Click + Configure IPMI.

3. | At the Configure IPMI dialogue window, enter your Management username and Management password. Click Save.

4. | Each row is one server. For the desired server, under IPMI, click + Add BMC.

5. | In the New BMC window, enter an IP address or hostname for this BMC. Note: This address is always stored as an IPv4 address, so if the mapping from hostname to IPv4 address later changes in DNS, it will need to be updated here as well.

6. | Click Save.