•HP Intelligent Power Distribution Units (HP iPDUs), which the appliance can automatically discover and control.

•Other power delivery devices that the appliance cannot discover. By manually adding these devices to the appliance, they become available for tracking, inventory, and power management purposes.

Regardless of how power delivery devices are added to the appliance, the appliance automatically generates the same types of analysis (capacity, redundancy, and configuration). For iPDUs, the appliance gathers statistical data and reports errors.

Connectivity and synchronization with the appliance

The appliance monitors the connectivity status of iPDUs. If the appliance loses connectivity with an iPDU, an alert displays until connectivity is restored. The appliance will try to resolve connectivity issues and clear the alert automatically, but if it cannot, you must resolve the issue and manually refresh the iPDU to bring it in synchronization with the appliance.

The appliance also monitors iPDU to remain synchronized with changes to hardware and power connections. However, some changes to devices made outside of the control of the appliance (from iLO or the OA, for example) may cause them to become out of synchronization with the appliance. You may have to manually refresh devices that lose synchronization with the appliance.

NOTE: HP recommends that you do not use iLO or the OA to make changes to a device. Making changes to a device from its iLO or OA could cause it to lose synchronization with the appliance.

You can manually refresh the connection between the appliance and an iPDU from the Power Delivery Devices screen. See the online help for the Power Delivery Devices screen to learn more.

19.1.4 About racks

A rack is a physical structure that contains IT equipment such as enclosures, servers, power delivery devices, and unmanaged devices (an unmanaged device uses slots in the rack and consumes power or exhausts heat, but it is not managed by the appliance). You can manage your racks and the equipment in them by adding them to the appliance. Having your racks managed by the appliance enables you to use the appliance for space and power planning. The appliance also gathers statistical data and monitors the power and temperature of the racks it manages.

When you add an enclosure to the appliance, it automatically creates a rack and places the enclosure in it. The appliance places into the rack all enclosures connected by management link cables. When enclosures are added, the appliance places them in the rack from top to bottom. To accurately depict the layout of your enclosures within the rack, you must edit the rack to place the enclosure in the proper slots.

You can use the appliance to view and manage your rack configuration and power delivery topology. You can specify the physical dimensions of the rack (width, height, and depth), the number of U slots, and the location of each piece of equipment in the rack. You can specify the rack PDUs that provide power to the rack, and their physical position in the rack or on either side. You can also describe how the devices in the rack are connected to those PDUs.

NOTE: The default rack height is 42U. When the appliance discovers an HP Intelligent Series Rack, it sets the rack height to 42U if there is no managed server hardware above slot 42. If an HP Intelligent Series Rack contains server hardware above slot 42, the appliance sets the rack height to the highest slot that contains managed server hardware. If you add server hardware to a higher slot later, the appliance adjusts the rack height automatically.

After adding a rack to the appliance for management, you can add the rack to a data center to visualize the data center layout and to monitor device power and cooling data.

After the rack is under management, you can configure the power delivery topology with redundant and uninterruptible power supplies to the devices in the rack.

140 Managing power and temperature