I spent part of today getting a new Dell PowerEdge M1000e blade chassis up and running. We've been limping along on a beta chassis for a while and finally found some time to move to the new one.

Sometimes I forget how easy we make things. I used to work at IBM and did many things around that blade solution. When I brought a new IBM blade chassis up I had to run a crossover cable from my laptop to the management module of the blade, and it would boot up with a default IP address. So then I had to configure the laptop to be on the same subnet and then reconfigure the management module to be on the "real" network. Quite a pain.

On the Dell Blade chassis, I get access to the Chassis Management Controller (CMC) right through the KVM. When you hit PRNT SCRN to change blades the CMC shows up as an option. It's just like you were telnet'd or ssh'd into the CMC. I can configure the IP right from the keyboard. Soooo much easier.

Here's a picture of the CMC in the KVM interface and the single command I had to run to configure the CMC IP address.



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