1.2.1 Server profiles

A server profile captures key aspects of a server configuration in one place, including firmware levels, BIOS settings, network connectivity, boot order configuration, iLO settings, and unique IDs.

Server profiles are one of the features that enable you to provision converged infrastructure hardware quickly and consistently according to your best practices. Server profiles enable your experts to specify a server configuration before the server arrives, enabling your administrators to quickly bring a new server under management when the server hardware is installed.

For example, you can create a server profile that is not assigned to a particular server, but specifies all the configuration aspects—such as BIOS settings, network connections, and boot order—to use for a type of server hardware. After the server is installed in an enclosure bay, you can do one of the following:

•Directly assign the server profile to the enclosure bay•Copy the server profile and assign the copy to the enclosure bay.

You can also copy or move a server profile that has been assigned to hardware in an enclosure bay. If you copy a server profile, you can save it for future use by not assigning the copy to an enclosure bay.

1.2.2 Groups, templates, and sets

Software-defined infrastructure—such as server profiles, groups, templates, and sets—enable you to:

•Use your experts to define server and networking configurations for specific environments before you install data center hardware.

•Provision hundreds of servers quickly and consistently without requiring that your experts take action for every server you deploy.

•Simplify the distribution of configuration changes across your data center.Expert design with consistent deployment

Your experts in different technical areas can create templates, groups, and sets with their configuration best practices built in. Using these resources and server profiles, you can ensure that the infrastructure for thousands of workloads are provisioned consistently, regardless of who does the provisioning.

Server profiles capture the server configuration in once place. You can use unassigned server profiles to rapidly deploy multiple servers with the same configuration. For more information about server profiles, see “Server profiles” (page 17).

1.2 Hardware and software provisioning features 17