iDRAC Server Configuration Profiles A server profile is a single file containing configuration values for your server including BIOS settings, iDRAC config, Network config and RAID config. Once you're happy with your server setup you can then deploy the profile to multiple servers in your environment.
Hello, my name is Ted. I'm a Senior Engineer with Systems Management at Dell Technologies. Today, we're going to talk about server configuration profiles. A server configuration profile is a single file that holds the configuration values for your server. It will contain items such as BIOS settings, iDRAC configuration, NIC settings, the alert configuration, and the RAID configuration.
This profile can include one or many different configuration components referenced as fully qualified device descriptors. This is the best method used to capture a golden image to deploy that to multiple servers in your environment. This is also used by multiple products that perform configuration compliance, like OpenManage Enterprise and OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter. The format of an SCP or server configuration profile is divided into sections. There are component sections which contain attributes, all contained within their profile.
To collect a configuration profile, we're going to need to log in to an iDRAC. You can find this in the GUI under "Configuration" and then "Server Configuration Profile". Choose the "Export" option, where we're going to choose a local file. Provide it a name. Then tell it to export all of our attributes. The different types of export profiles here are the "Basic", the "Replacement" and the "Clone". Basic is just general.
It's a non-destructive configuration. Replacement is not used very often. It is designed to back up all settings for a server. Then when restoring them, it replaces all those settings, including the service tag. The "Clone" setting is going to be the most common use for creating a golden image. It is a destructive process if it includes all of the RAID configuration because it will completely rewrite the RAID configuration on the target when restoring that, unless it is omitted. It's also important to call out that the "Clone" setting does not capture any I/O identity. For this, I'm going to choose "Basic" and I'm going to hit "Export". The process starts here and we are given a progress bar. Once complete, it's going to ask us where we want to save this file.
The default selection will be the "Downloads" folder on your computer. Click "Save Locally" and then it's there. You can also export this via command line using the RACADM. You're going to specify an XML file. Then we're going to specify a file name. You can also specify the location. And there we can see that the operation was completed successfully. Let's go ahead and take a look at one of these files. I've got some open here. Let's go ahead and pull the basic server profile that we just got. Edit it in Notepad. In here, we can see that this is a system configuration.
We can see the model number, as well as the service tag and time stamp. Here, the first component is the "iDRAC.Embedded.1" followed by all the attributes for that. If you wanted to change one of these attributes, you can manually edit this and change the state of this to "Disabled" as well as various other properties. I have additional settings that can be changed here, or you can change them on your iDRAC directly.
Once you have that configured how you would like it, then you can pull that configuration profile. Let me show you the end of the configuration right here, the end of the component. And then the next component starts here. It's just like any kind of XML where you've got the beginning and end tags for the components. Now, let's go over importing one of these configurations. I have created a golden image here. For import, we can import here. I'm going to browse to the local file. And give it my golden image. Tell it I want to import all components. After the import is done, we can have it turn the server off. Or we can have it be on. Then, if it is required to reboot the server, the shutdown process that's used.
We're going to go ahead and leave these as defaults and go ahead and import this configuration. And yes, I'm going to go ahead and import it now. And I can view the progress of that by looking at the job queue. Matter of fact, it looks like it was completed very quickly. We can see that it imported and applied the server configuration profile. You can also import that from the command line here, if instead of using the "get" command, we use "set", specifying the XML type and then the file that we want to put. We can see right here. We'll get a message that the job was created.
You can then log in to the iDRAC and view the job and watch it complete via the job queue, there. It's important to note some errors that you might see. Common errors would be the "SYS047" where the input file, the XML, is not compliant with the schema. That usually means that it was manually edited and something in the formatting is incorrect. You can probably edit that file and fix it, but in most instances, it's easier to actually recollect a new configuration profile and start from scratch. Another common error, the "SYS055", means that the XML file did complete, but with errors.
This could mean that the profile was set correctly, but one or more attributes could not be configured. Usually, it's a setting that it is unable to apply, like the boot order. Maybe there's a dependency in the BIOS or other configuration setting that is not set properly for that to apply. You can check the Lifecycle Log for details on what was not applied. When importing a server configuration profile, some best practices to consider are to remove the RAID configuration from the profile, unless you want this to be part of your deployment, because it is a destructive process to rebuild the RAID configuration. Any LDAP bind passwords that were used on the iDRAC that was used as a template are not transferred over to the new target iDRACs. You would have to enter these manually. It's best practice to comment out or delete any values under the BIOS system profile, unless you are changing those to a custom attribute and require those to be set.
It's also not recommended to include the boot order unless the bootable devices are completely identical on the server that was used as a template and the server that is being used as a target. I also recommend only using server configuration profiles created on one particular model of server to be applied to that same model of server. Another thing to note is that Dell has a GitHub repository. This GitHub repository contains Python scripts for all the different API functions that you can do through the iDRAC. In this list, you will also find the export system configuration profile at the local storage or export system configuration profile to a network share.
Thank you for watching our video on server configuration profiles.
