Kickstarts Failing 30% Of Time On Dell 620 Blades

Home » CentOS » Kickstarts Failing 30% Of Time On Dell 620 Blades
CentOS 2 Comments

I have a large set of Dell 620 blades fully populated with memory and duel socket CPUs, CentOS6.4 image.

I have a kickstart that I am using to pxe boot 36 blades. I have two internal drives which are raid1 (two disks formed into one, no redundancy), not san attached In the first set, 9 successfully completed. 7 more built correctly after trying another pxe boot. 2 just wont pxeboot

In the second set I had 11 fail and 5 succeed and the two I tried again failed. When they fail, they go to GRUB. I try booting from disk from the drac and still get grub It looks like the complete CentOS kickstart occurs as it goes through the whole install before rebooting and failing.

Any idea why this would happen with identical hardware, identical kickstart/image, inside the same blade chassis. Any idea what to test.

2 thoughts on - Kickstarts Failing 30% Of Time On Dell 620 Blades

  • Dan Hyatt wrote:

    Nasty thoughts: look at one that’s gone to grub, and from the grub command line, try root (). Then try kernel \vm

    I’m just wondering if either they’re not pointing to the same UUID, or if they’re looking at /dev/sda, and some of them have enumerated it so that it’s /dev/sdb, or whatever. Also, I wonder about the possibility of a race issue, if they’re all trying to come up at the same time.

    mark