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Working with placeholder chassis

You can pre-provision servers that will be installed in a Flex System chassis at a later time by defining a placeholder chassis to act as a target for the server pattern until the physical hardware arrives.

About this task

When you deploy a server pattern to a placeholder chassis, Lenovo XClarity Administrator creates a server profile for all 14 server bays in the Flex System chassis and reserves the management IP addresses and virtual Ethernet or Fibre Channel addresses for the servers.

The placeholder chassis bundles all of the server profiles, so that when the hardware arrives, you can deploy the placeholder chassis to activate the server profiles on the physical servers instead of deploying all 14 server profiles individually. Each server must be rebooted to fully activate the server profile.

  • Creating a placeholder chassis
    You can create a placeholder chassis that can be pre-provisioned before the hardware is installed. Provisioning compute nodes in the chassis reserves management IP addresses and virtual Ethernet or Fibre Channel addresses.
  • Deploying a server pattern to a placeholder chassis
    You can deploy a server pattern to each bay in a placeholder chassis. Deploying a server pattern before the servers are installed in the Flex System chassis creates a server profile for each server bay in the chassis and reserves management IP addresses and virtual Ethernet or Fibre Channel addresses.
  • Deploying a placeholder chassis
    After you pre-configure a placeholder chassis by deploying a server pattern to that placeholder chassis, and then discover and manage the actual chassis, you can deploy the placeholder chassis to configure the actual compute nodes.