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Is there a way to install an image on and provision a bare metal SuperMicro IPMI server from the ground up with Ansible via in-band IPMI over VPN?

I'm looking to see if I can automate the installation part of the process so all I need to do is add the IP to an Ansible inventory and run the playbook to have the bare metal server up and running with a Packer image.

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  • What operating system are you working with?
    – ewwhite
    Sep 3, 2014 at 7:18
  • Ubuntu 14.04 x64. However, the packer image will be the end result of running ansible so I may just drop down to a simple shell script that installs the image and adds the IP of the server to an Ansible inventory.
    – paulkon
    Sep 3, 2014 at 14:40

3 Answers 3

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Supermicro servers generally let you connect virtual media to them via the IPMI web interface, but also via a cli tool called 'smcipmitool', available from supermicro.

smcipmitool is java based, and is a bit of pain to work with as it covers multiple generations and types of hardware, but it should include support for mounting virtual media.

You should be able to automate bare metal deployment from here, eg by having a fully automated install (custom kickstart file burned into your ISO for example).

The IPMI controller can also be set up to expose a serial over lan port (SOL), which is normally ttyS1. If this is all set up properly, you can use ipmitool and the sol interface, together with expect scripts, to handle pretty much anything you might need to do that can't be done via a kickstart install.

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The only IPMI vendor neutral way to install an image using IPMI is with the PICMG HPM.1 specification. It defines the IPMI messages used to transfer and validate the the image. An HPM.1 image can consists of a sequence of 255 sections with each section being an any combination or ARM, Java, x86, FPGA code or anything else the receiver hardware defines.

HPM.1 has been supported by IPMItool for 4+ years. The disadvantage is that it is slow for blade systems what have shared IPMB bus. It is faster with a radial IPMB bus. To make it an order of magnitude faster, 20 minutes vs 2 minutes make sure the vendor supports HPM.2.

SuperMicro uses a number of IPMI vendors and you might have to order the IPMI BMC hardware/software directly from that vendor.

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  • I'm going to be using SoftLayer's SuperMicro servers that have IPMI 2.0 cards according to: knowledgelayer.softlayer.com/procedure/using-ssl-vpn I'm still not understanding if the IPMItool can be used to upload and install an image via the terminal instead of through a web browser Java applet.
    – paulkon
    Sep 4, 2014 at 16:26
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you can use smcipmitool to mount an iso. you must however enter the "smcipmitool shell" before you mount iso. If you prep a kickstart iso by adding a ks.cfg file to root iso tree and updating boot.cfg to boot to it, you can have fully automated install. Supermicro did not make the smcipmitool very scriptable.

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