Provisioning DELL servers using only linux tools

Solution 1:

Why start with the DRACs at all? Dell can ship servers with a preconfigured RAID setup, so all you need is autodeploy an OS on all of them (kickstart/pxe/foreman/whatever you prefer), and then configure the DRACs locally using racadm when you have an OS already running on the hosts. That, in turn, can also be automated using Puppet/Chef/Ansible/Salt/etc

Solution 2:

Here is a great guide for setting up an OS using Linux tools: Kickstart Guide

Regardless of whether the servers have DHCP or not, you should still be able to PXE boot them... Usually, if you press F12 when the machine starts up, you can choose to boot via Network Card.

If you configure your kickstart server on the same network, you can image a Dell blade/server in less than 5 mins.

You might want to look at the BIOS options as well, to enable PXE booting as a default option, but ensure that you have an option in your PXE config (on the kickstart server) to boot from local disk after initial setup, otherwise it will keep reinstalling every time you reboot.

Solution 3:

If all you want is DHCP you can order you servers that way. When you customize your order:

Under "Systems Management Upgrades"

select "Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol Enabled"

If you want to try auto-discovery refer to my answer here: How to use auto-discovery with iDRAC Enterprise?

you can use you can use "Dell Management Plug-In for VMware vCenter". The piece that handles auto discovery run in a standalone VM. I would re-enable auto-discovery on a server that you have and play with it before you order allot of them configured that way.

For more information about Auto-Discovery: http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/b/techcenter/archive/2012/09/14/auto-discovery-network-setup-specification.aspx