Setting up the BladeCenter H

Well, we finally had our maintenance window today, in which we planned the hardware exchange for our current Dell Blade Chassis (don’t ask!). The exchange went fine, but as we started exploring the components (like the IBM BladeCenter SAN switches — which are in fact Cisco MDS 9100) we hit a few road blocks.

First, the default user name/password combo for the Cisco MDS 9100 for the BladeCenter is USERID/PASSW0RD (just as the rest of the password combinations).

Next, we started tinkering around with the Catalyst Switch modules. A hint to myself:

Whenever setting up the switch via the WebGUI, make sure you setup both passwords. The password for the switch itself (when prompted by the WebGUI, enter “admin” as well as the password you just entered.

Now, you should be able to connect to the switch with telnet and be able to access the EXEC mode (and unlike me who struggled ~30 minutes till one of my trainees told me to enter a switch password — out of curiosity).

Now, here the list of commands I needed to setup the switch’s “basics”:

2 thoughts to “Setting up the BladeCenter H”

  1. What drove your decision for IBM? Which Dell chassis was this that you replaced (sorry, had to ask)? Did you look at the HP cClass stuff at all?

  2. We bought a PowerEdge 1855 with two PowerEdge 1955 (or was it the other way around ?!) back in 2006 which we wanted to fill with more blades, but Dell told us that there ain’t no blades available for that chassis anymore.

    At that point, we basically made the decision never to trust Dell again, regarding “critical” services. Basically if you can’t buy hardware (a blade is hardware to me) after two years for a blade, the company selling that is in a dutch for me.

    And since we are an IBM shop up till now, that made our decision rather simple. And no, we hadn’t looked at the HP cClass stuff 😉

Leave a Reply to Christian Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I accept that my given data and my IP address is sent to a server in the USA only for the purpose of spam prevention through the Akismet program.More information on Akismet and GDPR.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.