Configuring IBM IMM from Windows (Remotely)

I had a server shipped to a remote site today and had forgotten to preconfigure the network settings for the IBM IMM. Luckily this can be configured from the machine from within Windows.

To do this, first of all download the Advanced Settings Utility for appropriate operating system, in this case Windows Server 2008 R2, so I selected the x64 version from the IBM site.

Download and extract the utility and then run it from  a command prompt. I required just the IP Address, Subnet Mask and Default Gateway address changing to static values. This will also disabled DHCP on the IMM interface and then reboot the IMM to apply the new address.

asu64.exe set imm.hostipaddress1 192.168.1.10

asu64.exe set imm.hostipsubnet1 255.255.255.0

asu64.exe set imm.gatewayipaddress1 192.168.1.1

asu64.exe set imm.dhcp1disabled

asu64.exe set imm.reboot

IBM Hardware Warranty Lookup

The URL for the IBM Hardware Warranty lookup site is here

Updating IBM System x Server Firmware

Being used to primarily dealing HP hardware, I was at a loss to how to go about updating the firmware on IBM System x  (x86) servers. It's straight forward with a bit of googling..

One approach is to download the appropriate firmware using IBMs 'UpdateXpress' to a local repository and then use the 'Bootable Media Creator' to either create CD, USB or PXE boot media.

UpdateXpress can be found http://www-947.ibm.com/support/entry/portal/docdisplay?lndocid=SERV-XPRESS

BoMC - http://www-947.ibm.com/support/entry/portal/docdisplay?lndocid=TOOL-BOMC

Running IBM DSA on ESXi Servers

I'm in the process of troubleshooting what we believe to be flat disk controller batteries in a number of our IBM blade servers, as part of this process IBM support have asked us to supply the logs from BladeCenter and also the individual blade.

There's several ways of doing this, one way is to boot from the DSA .ISO (here), another is to download the DSA portable executable and run it from your workstation and let it interrogate the ESXi server remotely.

1. Enable 'Remote Tech Support Mode' on your ESXi server via the Console. (System Customization > Troubleshooting Options > Enable Remote Tech Support (SSH)
2. Download the portable version for your OS (I used ibm_utl_dsa_dsyt85t-3.40_portable_windows_i386.exe)
3. Run DSA with the following arguments

   ibm_utl_dsa_dsyt85t-3.40_portable_windows_x86-64.exe --vmware-esxi user:password@ip-address

   'user' being the username (normally root), 'password' being the password associated with the account and the 'ip-address' being of that of the ESXi Host.