Our focus today is around integration with the Redfish standard. In this article, Blackcore’s Chief Technology Officer, James Lupton will guide you through the intricacies of this feature set and offer valuable perspectives on how to maximize Redfish in your environment alongside Blackcore servers.
What is Redfish®?
DMTF’s Redfish® is a standard designed to deliver simple and secure management for converged, hybrid IT and the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). Both human readable and machine-capable, Redfish leverages common Internet and web services standards to expose information directly to the modern tool chain.
In simple terms, the standard provides the end user with a RESTful API for querying, setting, and managing various aspects of a server system – particularly those that are typically found in an IPMI implementation.
What are the Benefits?
Redfish can be used to query system-level configurations, modify configurations, and receive telemetry updates from Blackcore systems. As this is provided by a RESTful service, it’s possible to easily create scripts and automation tools to manage and monitor multiple systems with ease.
Why do we interoperate with Redfish®?
Feedback from Blackcore clients was that open standards were preferred for integration over proprietary tools. Redfish allows clients to monitor, manage, and build telemetry from a single toolchain across a wide variety of host devices, network peripherals, and more. Redfish is quickly becoming the de facto method for interacting with server systems.
How can I access these tools?
Redfish is typically available via the dedicated management port IP address. The Redfish service can be polled via the following URL:
The web browser can be used to navigate the Redfish schema, but it is not the most intuitive or easy to read. A RESTful client can be used to browse the schema more easily and will also allow you to send various commands to the interface – such as GET and POST, etc.
Nightingale is an example client.
Once familiar you can start to create your automation and scripts. You can find various code examples to interface with Redfish online. This can be done completely from scratch with your own code or you can also use tools to wrap the commands for you. For example, the DMTF provides “redfishtool” for this purpose.
https://github.com/DMTF/Redfishtool
Various tools will integrate with Redfish systems to provide intuitive dashboards and reporting. Prometheus is a popular tool for this and has a Redfish plugin.
You can view our Redfish® documentation here.
Throughout the coming months, we will be releasing our own code examples for Blackcore products on common Redfish queries. Keep an eye on our Knowledge Base for more Redfish information.
If you would like to learn more about your options for integrating Blackcore with Redfish, please email your account manager. If you are new to Blackcore and would like to learn more, you can email [email protected] or book a call with our CRO Ciaran Kennedy here.
James Lupton