Communicating with the IBM Director software

The IBM® Director program is a systems-management product that comes with some BladeCenter® units. The IBM® Director software communicates with the BladeCenter unit through the Ethernet port on the active management module.

See http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/xseries/systems_management/ xseries_sm/dwnl.html for the version of IBM Director software that you can use to manage redundant management modules.

For you to configure the remote alert recipients for IBM Director over LAN, the remote alert recipient must be an IBM Director-enabled server.

To communicate with the BladeCenter unit, the IBM Director software needs a managed object (in the Group Contents page of the IBM Director Management Console main window) that represents the BladeCenter unit. If the BladeCenter management-module IP address is known, the network administrator can create an IBM Director managed object for the unit. If the IP address is not known, the IBM Director software can automatically discover the BladeCenter unit (out-of-band, using the Ethernet port on the BladeCenter management module) and create a managed object for the unit.

For the IBM Director software to discover the BladeCenter unit, your network must initially provide connectivity from the IBM Director server to the BladeCenter management-module Ethernet port. To establish connectivity, the management module attempts to use DHCP to acquire its initial IP address for the Ethernet port. If the DHCP request fails, after 2 minutes the management module uses the static IP address that is assigned to it. Therefore, the DHCP server (if it is used) must be on the management LAN for your BladeCenter unit.

Notes:

All management modules are preconfigured with the same static IP address. You can use the management-module Web interface to assign a new static IP address for each BladeCenter unit. If DHCP is not used and you do not assign a new static IP address for each BladeCenter unit before you attempt to communicate with the IBM Director software, only one BladeCenter unit at a time can be added onto the network for discovery. Adding multiple units to the network without a unique IP address assignment for each BladeCenter unit results in IP address conflicts.
For I/O-module communication with a remote management station, such as a management server that is running IBM Director Server, through the management-module external Ethernet port, the I/O-module internal network interface and the management-module internal and external interfaces must be on the same subnet.