Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The result of discovery is a list of assets—chassis, systems, service processors,
and operating systems—which can then be managed. If you have more than a few
systems, you will benefit from grouping them by hardware type, or by OS or OS ver-
sion, or by other criteria. Ops Center provides the ability to place an asset into mul-
tiple groups. Once you establish groups of assets, you can apply changes to several
systems at once based on criteria you choose. You can also report on the status of
several systems with a single operation. For example, you can update the firmware
on all of your T5120 systems, using a group you have created for them, and then
apply a patch to all of your Solaris 10 5/09 systems, using a different group.
Once Ops Center knows about your hardware assets, it can provision firmware,
an operating system, or VEs to a single system or to groups of systems at once. It
uses a combination of standard tools to perform provisioning.
Yo u c a n u s e t h e O p s C e n t e r B U I t o i n i t i a t e a p r o v i s i o n i n g a c t i o n , w h i c h m a y
include one or more computers. This action is registered with the EC. The EC
begins the process by sending appropriate binary images to one or more Proxy
Controllers, unless they already have those images. The Proxies then use those
images to provision systems on their subnets.
9.3.5.1 Provisioning Firmware
As the first step in provisioning assets, you define firmware images, which consist
of a file containing the firmware and associated metadata. Metadata includes sys-
tem types, firmware version, and a list of other firmware on which this firmware
depends. The last piece of information helps Ops Center to prevent incompatible
combinations of firmware—for example, firmware on a blade chassis and firm-
ware on the blades.
Firmware images are then used to define firmware profiles. A
profile
is a set
of one or more firmware images and provisioning policies. These policies define
the process that Ops Center will use to update the firmware images. You can use
profiles to update firmware, and to generate compliance reports showing the firm-
ware version installed on a set of systems.
Ops Center also generates compliance reports to verify that a firmware update
to multiple systems—perhaps hundreds of them—has completed successfully.
9.3.5.2 Provisioning Operating Systems
Ops Center provisions several UNIX-like operating systems and can provision
Logical Domains and Containers as well. Operating systems that can be provisioned
are listed in Table 9.1. Ops Center uses the JumpStart Enterprise Toolkit (JET) to
provision Oracle Solaris, Kickstart for RHEL and OEL, and AutoYAST for SLES.
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