Before you
begin
After the 90-day free trial expires, you can continue to use XClarity Administrator to manage and monitor your hardware for free; however,
you must purchase full-function-enablement licenses for each managed
server that supports XClarity Administrator advanced functions to
continue using the OS deployment function. Lenovo XClarity Pro provides entitlement to service and support and the full-function-enablement
license. For more information about purchasing Lenovo XClarity Pro, contact your Lenovo representative or authorized business
partner. For more information, see Installing the full-function enablement license.
About this
task
XClarity Administrator provides a simple way to deploy operating-systems images
to bare-metal servers, which typically do not
have an operating system installed.
Attention: If
you deploy an operating system to a server that has an operating system
installed, XClarity Administrator performs a fresh installation that overwrites the partitions
on the target disks
Several factors determine the amount
of time that is required to deploy an operating system to a server:
- The amount of RAM that is installed in the server, which affects
how long the server takes to start up.
- The number of and types of I/O adapters that are installed on
the server, which affects the amount of time that it takes XClarity Administrator to perform an inventory of the server. It also affects
the amount of time that it takes for the UEFI firmware to start when
the server is started up. During an operating-system deployment, the
server is restarted multiple times.
- Network traffic. XClarity Administrator downloads the operating-system image over the data network
or the operating-system deployment network.
- The hardware configuration on the host on which Lenovo XClarity Administrator virtual appliance is installed. The amount of RAM, processors,
and hard drive storage can affect download times.
Important: To deploy an operating-system image
from
XClarity Administrator, at least one of the
XClarity Administrator interfaces (Eth0 or Eth1) must have IP network connectivity
to the server network interface that is used to access the host operating
system.
Operating-system deployment uses the interface that is defined on
the
Network Access page. For more information
about network settings, see
Configuring network access.
Before you perform
a bare-metal operating-system deployment on a server, prepare the
server by updating firmware to the latest levels and configuring the
server using Configuration Patterns. For more information, see Updating firmware on managed devices and Configuring servers using configuration patterns.
Attention: It
is recommended that you do not use XClarity Administrator to perform a bare-metal operating-system deployment on
Converged and ThinkAgile appliances.
The following figure illustrates the workflow for deploying an OS
image to a server.