Capturing best-practice configurations

After setting up your data center, you can create server profiles to provision hundreds of servers as easily as you provision one server. A server profile is the configuration for a server instance. Server profiles and server profile templates capture the entire server configuration in one place, enabling you to replicate new server profiles and to modify them to reflect changes in your data center.

A server profile includes:

  • Basic server identification information

  • Connectivity settings for Ethernet networks, network sets, Fibre Channel, and FCoE networks

  • Firmware versions

  • Local storage settings

  • SAN storage settings

  • Boot settings

  • BIOS settings

  • iLO settings

When you create a server profile, you can specify the server hardware to which you want to apply the profile. Leave the server hardware unassigned if the server hardware is not yet installed. You can capture best-practice configurations in a server profile template, and then create individual server profiles. Server profiles enable you to create a provisioning baseline for server hardware types in an enclosure. The server hardware type determines the available boot options you can select in the server profile.

For more information about UEFI, see UEFI FAQs at Unified Extensible Firmware Interface Forum.

By selecting to manage BIOS settings through the appliance, you can view all settings, only those you have modified, or only those that are different than the default values. The BIOS settings displayed depend on the supported server hardware.

Applying the sections of a server profile to server hardware is a sequential process. The screen displays the current section being applied, followed by other sections that have been applied successfully. If a server profile needs to be reapplied due to an error, only the unconfigured sections and unapplied sections are reapplied. For example, if a firmware update succeeds, but the subsequent BIOS portion of the apply operation fails, the firmware is not applied a second time when the profile is reapplied. This helps to prevent unnecessary and time-consuming updates for the profile.

Best practice: Perform server profile management tasks on one enclosure at a time

For best performance, create, delete, edit, copy, or move server profiles for server hardware on one enclosure before managing server profiles on a different enclosure.