Administer > SA Provisioning > Create new SA build plans > Manage the state of the server

Manage the state of the server

This section describes managing a server’s state which may be required before running Build Plans against the server.

Asserting the state of the server

When creating or modifying Build Plans, you must account for the server’ state when certain steps are executed. To do this, you use the Wait for HPE SA Agent script (also called the Wait step)The script has parameters that are used to assert the state of the server:

  • Using the --maintenance parameter asserts that the target server is in Maintenance mode (running a service OS).
  • Using the --production parameter asserts that the target is in production mode (running a production OS) and has an SA Agent installed with full capabilities.

If the target server is not in the asserted state or if an SA Agent does not report at all, this step fails. This assures that any step after a Wait step can make assumptions about the state of the server.

For this reason, it is good practice to start Build Plans with a Wait step to assert early that the server is in the right state before executing anything else. The next section describes how to force the desired state of the server.

Change the state of a server

You may often need to have a server reboot from the service OS to the production OS or the reverse. To do this, you can use the Boot and Reboot scripts as Run Script steps.

The Boot step boots the server into a specific service OS. It can make use of all available means to do so. The most generic way to do so requires an SA Agent to be functional on the target server to be able to reboot the server. The boot step configures network booting for this specific server and reboots it to the desired Service OS. Note that this only works if network booting occurs before booting from disk in the server's boot order.

If the target server is an HPE ProLiant with a registered iLO, see iLO support, the step does not require an SA Agent to be present in order to reboot the server, and also is able to configure one-time boot order on the server, so the server's boot order settings are irrelevant.