The Conventional Lab vs. the Automated Lab
The chart below outlines five key ways that Gales automated test and development solutions can transform the drawbacks of the conventional test lab into streamlined, efficient, and cost effective processes: Conventional Test Lab Spend days changing hard-wired topologies, static test beds, and manual patch panels. Risk human error with manual capture and implementation of device configurations and network topologies. Waste capital investment on dedicated, underutilized equipment. Automated Test Lab with Gale Solutions Spend minutes doing flexible, dynamic topology setup, tear down, and replication through intuitive GUI. Eliminate errors through drag and drop capture and automated implementation. Enhance investment by optimizing scheduling and allocation of both shared and dedicated equipment. Accelerate testing and overall development time with remote access to entire labs with full remote control of all lab and test resources. Gain efficiency and cost savings with portable, reusable test automation with device and topology independence.

Solution Brief

Productivity. Control. Insight.
Optimize Test and Development With Advanced Lab and Test Automation Solutions

Ask Yourself

If youre asking any or all of these five questions, you need the AutoTest, Lab Manager, and GaleForce solutions for automated test and development: 1. hat options do I have W to improve test quality and coverage? 2. ow can I achieve fully H automated, lights-out testing across multiple configurations? 3. hats the most W efficient way to accurately track and publish test progress? 4. hats the most W cost effective way to give distributed development teams more visibility and faster access to lab resources? 5. ow can I reduce H unnecessary capital expenditures in our testing labs?
We use Gale software to achieve a higher level of efficiency, unparalleled power, and flexibility. In addition, it has allowed us to drive down our cost and pass that on to our customer base. Co-Founder and CEO Interoperability Test Lab
Slow down test processes with limited remote access to individual devices. Lose efficiency with high-effort, hard-coded test automation that is difficult to maintain.
Your Challenge: Optimizing Test and Development for Faster Time-to-Market
Your test and development teams are a critical part of your business but they consistently take milestone deadlines to the wire, and sometimes beyond. So whats slowing them down? Its the same persistent problem in most network and testing labs the excessive time it takes to re-cable and manually set up test configurations between tests. And in some cases, additional time is wasted and additional costs are incurred by having to fix human errors that can occur during the complex procedure to replace manual patch panels. If you are like many companies, you probably want to expand testing to globally distributed teams. Yet the complexity and cost of equipment in multiple labs is prohibitive. Whats more, too many of your costly lab resources are being under-utilized, while others are being stretched to the limit. You need more control, more insight into their usage patterns, plus a simplified way to share resources cost effectively.

The Gale Solutions

GaleForce is an advanced, end-to-end automation and orchestration platform that optimizes the management and provisioning of physical and virtual environments in the lab, data center, or cloud. Like Lab Manager, GaleForce automates the Layer 1 control plane, but also manages Layer 2 switching, software provisioning, virtualization, and other advanced capabilities. Lab Manager is Gales award winning, easy-to-use software solution for management and automation of a labs physical layer connectivity. By combining device management, dynamic reconfiguration of automated patch panels, power control, and remote access, it delivers unprecedented levels of speed, efficiency, and repeatability to optimize test and development. AutoTest provides a complete framework to better organize tests, schedule and execute them, as well as track their results. It gives management real-time insight into the coverage, status, and results of devices being tested, as well as facilitates the re-use and sharing of tests for faster, more reliable, and higher quality testing.

Market demands are driving your organization to improve test and development processes, but how can you overcome the following challenges?
Using any of these products, test engineers can streamline design verification, regression, system, and interoperability testing for faster time-to-market.
Create pools of shared equipment to replace monolithic test beds. Reduce human error associated with cabling and configuration issues. Provide access to appropriate lab resources to globally distributed development teams. Reduce the risk in managing multiple infrastructure solutions. Increase visibility and improve tracking of lab resources to support more informed capital expenditure decisions.

How to Get Started

Look to Gale Technologies when you need to automate network connectivity for optimized test and development processes. To learn more about our solutions, please call us at +1 866-450-3336 toll free in North America or +1 408-213-4900 worldwide, visit us at www.galetechnologies.com, or email info@galetechnologies.com.
Gale Technologies has the answer. We apply our groundbreaking solutions for advanced lab and test automation to eliminate error-prone manual steps in pre-production testing and optimize the use of your under-utilized lab resources. As a result, we can help you improve test quality and coverage to support faster time-to-market.
Automate Test and Development with Gale Solutions
The deadline for a major development milestone is looming and the ball is now in the hands of the test engineering teams two in the U.S. and one in Europe. How can your distributed teams share resources efficiently and avoid the time delays and errors common to manual re-cabling and re-configuration? They can do it with AutoTest, Lab Manager, and GaleForce robust solutions for lab and test automation that provide the productivity, control, and insight they need.

About Gale Technologies

Gale Technologies provides advanced software solutions to automate, orchestrate, and optimize resources - transforming the process of infrastructure service delivery. As a pioneer of innovative solutions for provisioning and workflow automation across networking, server, storage, and virtualization technologies, Gale enables the automated and self-service provisioning of private and public cloud environments. The companys end-to-end solutions enable organizations to reduce capital and operational expenditures, set up any dynamic lab, demo, data center, or cloud in just minutes, and provide secure access to resources 24x7 from anywhere in the world. Gale Technologies is based in Santa Clara, CA, and serves a global customer base with offices in North America and Asia.

Version Control for Linux by Integrating HP Insight Control for Linux with Red Hat Network for HP ProLiant Servers
HP Insight Control for Linux V2.10 and higher

Table of Contents

Executive summary.... 2 HP Insight Control for Linux.... 3 Red Hat Network.... 3 Custom tool integration.... 4 Connecting to a Satellite Server.... 9 Provisioning.... 11 Capturing/deploying a Linux image.... 11 Updating ProLiant firmware... 11 Summary..... 12 For more information.... 13

Executive summary

This paper highlights version control capabilities that are available to Linux users by integrating HP Insight Control for Linux (IC-Linux) with Red Hat Network (RHN) support services. The use of standard firmware update capability in Insight Control for Linux v2.10 (and higher) can be coupled with Insight Control for Linux custom tool definitions to run command line interface (CLI) commands, commonly used by a system administrator to maintain a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5) system with Red Hat Network (RHN) support services, remotely. Basic maintenance concepts related to version control of firmware and the operating system distribution -- such as registering a server, updating software and hardware profiles, and retrieving and applying software errata to the system -are used as examples of extending Insight Control for Linux to handle these tasks for a single administration pane.
Figure 1. Sample process for Linux version control
Target audience: The concepts described in this paper are aimed at system integrators, solution designers, and system administrators. They should already have a strong background in working with Insight Control for Linux, as well as experience in maintaining systems with RHN using activation keys.
HP Insight Control for Linux
HP Insight Control for Linux is essential server management that provides comprehensive discovery, imaging and server deployment, health and performance management, remote management, virtualization, and power management for Linux-based ProLiant server platforms. Built on the industryleading HP Systems Insight Manager platform, this solution integrates open source technology with HP technologies to provide paths to the future. Lifecycle management is complemented by multisystem scaling, thermal and power management, and direct-to-the-hardware control. Insight Control for Linux is backed by the Linux expertise of HP and global HP Support. Why use HP Insight Control for Linux1? Integrated toolsets for Linux management productivity on industry-standard ProLiant x86 servers blade, rack, tower, and scalable form factors --- utilizing Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), HP Integrated Lights-Out (iLO). Architected to manage expanding Linux multi-server environments while providing productivity, utilization, and control Immediate productivity using Open source & Commercial technologies Integrated and auto-configured open source technologies (Nagios and others) for extensible health and performance management Maintain consistency with firmware update capabilities designed to operate in large-scale Linux environments. Integrate virtual environments using VMware ESX and XEN (open source hypervisor) Enable Linux users in Enterprise computing and Departmental clustering Integrate into existing management processes through industry standards Globally supported by HP HP Insight Control for Linux brings the full expertise of HP's management investments from UNIX and Microsoft Windows to the Linux environment, while providing flexibility to meet the variety of usual management tasks.

Red Hat Network

Red Hat Network is an easy-to-use systems management platform for your Linux infrastructure. Built on open standards, it uses a web-based graphical interface. Its services are provided through modules that allow you to add enhanced management capabilities. Red Hat Network provides simple tools to manage the life cycle of systems efficiently on your network, including provisioning new systems, managing their updates and configuration changes, monitoring system performance and eventually redeploying the systems for a new purpose. Red Hat Network lowers deployment, configuration and management costs and it enhances security through a single centralized tool, secure connection policies for remote administration, and secure content.
Features included from Insight Control for Linux v2.10, available in January 2009.

Custom tool integration

Extending the HP Insight Control for Linux to include RHN management tasks for a RHEL5 server is quite simple, given the flexibility of Insight Control for Linux. This document details the information for defining one of the many possible tasks used in RHN management of a RHEL5 server to illustrate the ease of extensibility. In this document, HP provides a table of suggested tasks and their CLI definitions, which provide insight in to the functionality customers have requested. Begin by connecting your web browser to your Insight Control for Linux central management server (CMS) and log into the Insight Control for Linux with the appropriate role based user account with administrator privileges. Select ToolsCustom ToolsNew Custom Tool menu option to initiate the definition of the new tools.

Figure 2. Define New Custom Tool
Insight Control for Linux offers three types of custom tools. For this integration, select Remote tool because the integration requires the custom tool to be run on the target host.
Figure 3. Select Tool Type
Click [Next]. The next screen, titled Step 2 Describe how the new custom tool will work, which is the main definition panel, opens. There are three key sections of this description page that need to be appropriately configured. Shown in Figure 4, the first section, Tool Parameters, defines the tool specifics that are visible to Insight Control for Linux administrator. In this example, the Name of the Tool is: RHN-Reg-NewSystem. In the Description field provide a concise description that will give the Insight Control for Linux administrator enough information to select this tool. This description also appears on the Manage Custom tools summary page. Use the Help comment field to give a more detailed description of the task. The Menu placement field determines how the custom tool appears in the Insight Control for Linux GUI. Additional menu levels are created by using the vertical pipe character (|) in this field. The basic structure is: top-level-menu|first-level-cascade|next-level-cascade. The name of the tool is added as an additional cascade to the last level described in the menu placement field. The menu options appear in an ascending sort order. Click on the Help on menu placement hotlink to launch a new browser window with more information. In the following example, Tools|Red Hat Network in Figure 4 creates the menu option shown in Figure 5.
Figure 4. Tool definition parameters
Figure 5. Tool Menu Layout
Shown in Figure 6, the second section defines the user account to be used on the target system that runs this tool. Select the Special user (root for Unix and Linux systems) option because the administration tasks we are defining would typically be done by the root user on a RHEL5 system.
Figure 6. Define remote user account
The selection for maximum number of targets the tool can select is left to the Insight Control for Linux administrator who is defining this tool. The premise of these examples allows for the default of Unlimited. Specify the complete CLI command that would normally be entered by the RHEL5 system administrator. The interface currently supports nine parameters. To register a RHEL5 system in a non-interactive mode, use the rhnreg_ks utility with the activationkey command option. This is the most basic command to register a system with RHN.
The activationkey option requires the RHEL5 system administrator to predefine an activation key through the RHN web interface using their RHN user account. After the key is defined and used as a parameter for the rhnreg_ks utility, RHN usernames, RHN passwords, RHN subscription numbers are not needed to complete the system registration and hence are not exposed in this tool definition. For more information on activation keys, see the RHN documentation. In Figure 7, the pneumonic ICERegKey is used as a documentation placeholder for the real activation key, which is a hexadecimal string of 32 characters for RHN. See Table 1 for the suggested command syntax. The rhnreg_ks utility also accepts the definition of an http proxy should the network infrastructure require the use of proxy servers to get to the RHN server. For more information, see the RHEL5 rhnreg_ks man page.

Figure 7. CLI command definition
Selections for the remaining options on this page are at the Insight Control for Linux Administrators discretion, depending on the custom tool being defined. The default of Standard output for command output format works well. Click [OK] to add the tool to the Custom Tools menu and display the Custom Tool summary page as shown in Figure 8:
Figure 8. New Tool Summary
Repeat the custom tool definition process for any additional RHEL5 management commands you want to administer from the Insight Control for Linux environment. Table 1 has a list of suggested commands that have been found to be useful in this integrated environment.
Table 1. Useful Tools to Define Custom Tool Name

RHN-Reg-NewSystem

Description
This command registers a system with Red Hat Network using an activation key This command imports the Red Hat GPG Key to the rpm database to validate rpm authenticity This command checks to see if any Red Hat Network task has been scheduled on the RHN server and runs it This command checks in with the RHN server to see if any errata packages are available for the currently installed software This command fetches and applies software errata from Red Hat Network Update System Profile on Red Hat Network This command registers a system with a local Red Hat Network Satellite Server
CLI Command /usr/sbin/rhnreg_ks -activationkey=hex_key_value /bin/rpm import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPGKEY-redhat-release /usr/sbin/rhn_check

RHN-Reg-RHGPGKey

RHN-ChkRedHatNetworkTask

RHN-Chk-SystemErrata

/usr/bin/yum check-update

RHN-Upd-SystemErrata

/usr/bin/yum update y
RHN-Upd-SystemProfile RHN-RegNewSystemLocalSatellite
/usr/sbin/rhn-profile-sync /usr/bin/wget O http://localsatserver IP address/pub/bootstrap/bootstr ap.sh | /bin/bash
Figure 9 displays the summary of the above custom tools, as defined in the Insight Control for Linux web interface.
Figure 9. RHN Tool Summary
Figure 10 depicts the Task Results information generated by running the suggested tool RHN-RegNewSystemLocalSatellite on a single server. The Stdout and Stderr output pages provide detailed information to the Insight Control for Linux Administrator in case the summary status indicates an unsuccessful completion of the tool on a given server.

Figure 10. Task Results

Connecting to a Satellite Server
If your organization has a Red Hat Network Satellite Server, you might find it useful to create an additional custom tool to connect to your satellite server instance. This custom tool will be slightly different from the ones described earlier because the tool simply launches a provided URL in a separate window. Here is the procedure to create the custom tool to connect to your satellite server:
1. Select the Tool New Custom Tool menu item.
The screen titled Step 1: Select the tool to create opens.
2. Select the button labeled Web page tool A tool that launches a web URL because the
custom tool will launch a web page.

3. Click [Next>].

The screen titled Step 2: Describe how the new custom tool will work opens.
4. Enter the new custom tool parameters. The tool parameters are very similar to what you provided
for the custom tools you created previously. Figure 11 is an example of a screen with the recommended parameters. For this option: Name of the tool text field Description text field Help comment text field Menu placement text field User account HP recommends: Connect to Satellite Server Connect to Red Hat Network Satellite Server Connect to Red Hat Network Satellite Server Tools|Red Hat Network Logged-in user radio button
Maximum number of targets URL Format of how target systems are passed to the url text field
none (so that the user will not be queried to select targets) Enter the URL for your satellite server (The example in Figure 11 uses http://rhnsatellite.example.com ) Leave this text field blank. It is not relevant for this custom tool.

5. Click [OK].

The custom tool should now be available to use.
Figure 11. New custom tool options for Red Hat Network Satellite Server connection

Provisioning

HP Insight Control for Linux also provides a provisioning tool set that can incorporate the one-time functions necessary to prepare and register systems with RHN. Customize the RHEL5 Kickstart files to include the appropriate one time functions (RHN-Reg-RHGPGKey and RHN-Reg-NewSystem or RHNReg-NewSystemLocalSatellite) CLI command equivalent in the Kickstart file. The available Kickstart files are listed in the GUI under the OptionsManage ICE-Linux Repository menu options. The Kickstart files are stored under a subdirectory name that matches the name given in the repository. For example, you can find the rh050 Kickstart file at /opt/repository/instconfig/rh050/rh050.cfg Insert the CLI command equivalent strings between the %post directive and %%completion%% macro. %post %%agentinstall%% /bin/rpm import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-redhat-release /usr/sbin/rhnreg_ks --activationkey=9783630d6a5f50813e8e80bd992d6ddd %%completion%% When incorporating the RHN registration task into a Kickstart file, HP recommends that you build the system with the target fully qualified domain name (FQDN). Although the FQDN is not the unique identifier for RHN registration, the FQDN is included in the RHN profile to simplify identifying systems in the RHN GUI. For additional information on customizing Insight Control for Linux Kickstart files, see the HP Insight Control for Linux User Guide.

Capturing/deploying a Linux image
Insight Control for Linux provides a set of tools that can capture and deploy a Linux image from and to managed systems. When systems are registered with RHN, a system ID is stored in an XML file /etc/sysconfig/rhn/systemid on the registered server. If you are using a system registered with RHN as the golden master for the captured Linux image, HP recommends you rename the systemid file to systemid.masterimage before performing the capture operation. This prevents any systems that are deployed with the Linux image from contacting RHN with a duplicate systemid string. After the capture task is complete, rename the systemid file back to its original name. Include, as a customization post task for deploying systems with the captured golden image, registering the system with RHN using the appropriate defined custom tool.
Updating ProLiant firmware
Insight Control for Linux2 has additional tools that allow you to integrate the HP ProLiant Firmware Maintenance CD onto your Insight Control for Linux CMS, then use Insight Control for Linux to update the firmware on a system, either on demand from the SIM user interface, or automatically, when a system is discovered using the Insight Control for Linux bare metal discovery feature. Firmware updates are run using the HP Smart Update Manager (HPSUM) tool from the Firmware Maintenance CD. All firmware updates are run using the HPSUM tools silent option, which means that the update is not interactive and allows the task to be scheduled. The firmware files you provide from the Maintenance CD or downloaded from the HP support web site are scanned, and any devices that can be updated will be updated. For additional information on setting up the
Features included from Insight Control Environment for Linux (ICE-Linux) v2.10, available in January 2009.
firmware repository, advanced configuration, and deploying firmware updates, see the HP Insight Control for Linux User Guide.

Summary

HP Insight Control for Linux provides the flexibility and extensibility to allow system administrators to view and manage their server infrastructure from a single web interface view. The integration of additional operating system-specific-management solutions, such as Red Hat Network, provides a simplified user interface to the operations staff for routine maintenance operations associated with version control.

For more information

Linux on ProLiant, www.hp.com/go/proliantlinux HP and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, www.hp.com/go/redhat Red Hat OS Lifecycle, www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/ HP Insight Control Environment for Linux, www.hp.com/go/ice-linux Open Source and Linux from HP, www.hp.com/go/linux
To help us improve our documents, please provide feedback at www.hp.com/solutions/feedback
2008, 2010 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. Microsoft and Windows are U.S. registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. Linux is a U.S. registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Red Hat and RPM are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. Nagios and the Nagios logo are registered trademarks of Ethan Galstad. VMware is a registered trademark of VMware, Inc. The Xen mark is a trademark of Citrix Systems, Inc., which manages the mark on behalf of the Xen open 139 source community. The Xen mark is registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and may also be registered in other countries. Use of the Xen mark on this product is not necessarily an indication of a relationship between or endorsement by Citrix Systems, Inc., the Xen community, or the Xen Advisory Board and the developers of this product, nor is it an indication that this product meets all the criteria for a Faithful Implementation of the Xen hypervisor set out at www.xen.org.

611006-001, April 2010