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Linux on the IBM BladeCenter JS21

Consolidating workloads with Linux and blade computing.

Blade computing has become common practice in many organizations and has seen tremendous growth over the past few years. IBM has led the market by offering the most consistent, flexible and integrated solution in the industry. Initial blade computing was limited to x86 environments, and while x86 Linux* has always been an option, the majority of blade installs included Microsoft* Windows* servers. With the introduction of the JS20 blade in May 2004, blade users had the option of running AIX* or 64-bit Linux on a blade with POWER4* technology-derived chips, specifically the Power PC* 970MP. This development, along with the increased reliability and capacity of x86 blades, has moved blade computing from edge-of-network to core applications.

IBM has continued to innovate the Power PC line of blade computing, and one year ago announced the JS21 blade. This follow-on to the JS20 offers dual-core processors, expanded memory capabilities, integrated serial attached SCSI (SAS) drives and the capability to micro-partition. Many administrators have adopted the Power PC technology-based blade for light AIX workloads, including testing and development as well as server farms running AIX or Linux. Because of the unique compute resources available within the Power PC 970MP processor, the high-performance computing community has begun adopting these blades for clusters. This article aims to enlighten the reader regarding blade computing from IBM, the JS21 blade and the specifics of installing Linux on the JS21.

Blade Computing from IBM

Blade computing is really about one thing: consolidation. All too often, it's thought physical consolidation is the main driver when purchasing a blade solution. In reality, power and cooling, cable reduction and consolidated management are also primary reasons for moving to a blade infrastructure. While IBM was not the first vendor to the market with blades, it has pioneered the overall integrated design and investment-protection points for all vendors. IBM has released three blade chassis since 2002: the BladeCenter* chassis, the BladeCenter T chassis and the BladeCenter H chassis. The BladeCenter T chassis is a telco-specific model for those requiring NEBS-3 compliance. The BladeCenter H chassis builds off the original by boosting the internal mid-plane to 10 Gb/s and adds high-speed switch bays. All three chassis are available now and use the same legacy switch bays and 30mm blade slots. This allows users to migrate every existing IBM* blade and BladeCenter switch module in a datacenter into the latest chassis.

All IBM chassis have integrated management modules that provide a single point of control for the blades, switch modules and chassis environmentals. IBM also boasts the most flexible portfolio of integrated switching, providing both Cisco and Nortel for IP infrastructure and Brocade, McData and QLogic for Fibre Channel (FC). If you prefer external switches or want increased bandwidth, pass-through modules are available for both IP and FC. Finally, Cisco and Voltaire offer industry-standard InfiniBand for users who require high-speed, low-latency interconnects and the benefits of I/O virtualization.

The JS21 Blade

The JS21 blade improves on the physical characteristics of its predecessor with dual-core processors, scalability to 16 GB of RAM and onboard mirrored SAS drives. The optional advanced POWER* virtualization functionality, along with virtual I/O server (VIOS), gives users the ability to micro-partition a single JS21 into as many as 10 partitions per processing core. In addition to owning and virtualizing all the blade's physical I/O resources, the VIOS partition runs the integrated virtualization manager (IVM) software and corresponding HTTP server through which micro-partitioning is administered. It's important to note, because of physical port limitations, it's not possible to manage JS21 blades with a hardware management console as you would rack-mount System p* platforms.

Integration with the IBM BladeCenter--Serial over LAN

For Intel* and AMD blades, the BladeCenter management module provides local and remote KVM switching. The JS21, however, doesn't support onboard video. To gain access to the local console of a JS21 blade, you must use serial over LAN (SoL). SoL works by streaming serial information to and from the JS21's onboard service processor over the network to the management module. An SoL connection is started for a particular blade after you begin a telnet, secure shell or local serial session with the advanced manage module. Although this is a different type of interface, users will no doubt find comfort after little experience. Users only need this interface during OS installation or when out-of-band management is necessary.

While IBM was not the first vendor to the market with blades, it has pioneered the overall integrated design and investment-protection points for all vendors.

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