7.7. mp and mpa: Blades

When you defined the nodehm.mgt type and told it something other than ipmi, and you want to manage it remotely with xCAT, then you probably need to fill in the mp and the mpa table. 

mpa

MPA stands for management processor adapter.  It is usually the gateway to talk to the service processor.  For example, IBM blades communicate through the Advanced Management Module to do power and console operations.  HP blades communicate through an Onboard Administrator.  Because these are their own entities you should define them as a node inside the xCAT database. 

nodeadd amm1 groups,=mm
nodeadd hpoa1 groups,=hpoa

Then in the MPA table you just need to tell xCAT the credentials to communicate with them.  This only requires the userid and password:

nodegrpch mm mpa.username=USERID mpa.password=PASSW0RD
nodegrpch hpoa mpa.username=admin mpa.password=admPass

HP DL Servers

HP DL Servers are not IPMI and have their own service processor protocol.  Hence we put an entry for each node in the mpa table.

nodech <node> mpa.username=admin mpa.password=admPass

mp

Now that the mpa gateway has been defined, we need to define the relationship between it to the nodes.  This is done via the mp table.  Its basicalliy done via the slot number:

nodech blade01 mp.mpa=amm mp.id=1
nodech hpbl001 mp.mpa=hpoa mp.id=1

Note that you should also define the management module here as well:

nodech amm1 mp.mpa=amm1

This is because you may wish to run xCAT commands on the management module itself.  (See the rspconfig command).