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Hardware Baselining

The hardware subsystem has methods to build universal hardware compatiable profiles. The universal-discover workflow contains a classifier that will automatically apply these profiles if present to configure machines similarly.

The baselining process can also build build-of-material (BOM) validators.

Set Up

To baseline a machine, you should configure the hardware to match what you want. It is sometime easier to manually configure a machine and then capture the configuration. This is not always required, but often matches existing procedures.

PXE boot a machine into sledgehammer and have it stop at universal-discover. Once the machine is idle, you will need to set some parameters on the machine.

  • universal/baseline/application - Required parameter that defines the pipeline being recorded. e.g. vcf-4.0.0
  • validate/record-parameters - Optional paramter that defines a list of parameters to record. These could be inventory parameters that will be recorded for validation in a BOM profile.
  • universal/baseline/bom - The name to use for this BOM. e.g. silver-compute If not specified, no BOM field as added to the profile names.

It can be helpful to create a baselining profile that records these parameters for later use.

Baseline a Machine

To baseline a machine, set the machine's workflow to universal-baseline and make sure the machine is Runnable, Runnable set to true.

Once the workflow is complete, there will be a couple of profiles create on DRP with the information about the BOM and the hardware configuration.

Validate the Profiles

To validate the profiles:

  • Delete the machine and drive the machine through rediscovery
  • Configure the universal/application parameter to the value used for universal/baseline/application
  • Reset the workflow to universal-discover

This machine will end up with the profiles on the machine.

Extract Profiles into Content Pack

To apply the profiles across the estate, you should build a content pack for storing these and version it. This will allow the multi-site manager to deploy them to managed endpoints or your own method for upload content to production servers. See Content Generation for more details.