Whether you are getting started with your first Dell PowerEdge M-Series blade or looking to optimize a farm you already have, the Dell TechCenter offers articles, demos, and peer discussions to help you. Here are a few:

• Blades focused Ask the Expert TechTuesday chats at 3PM including Bulking Up Blades Deployment on 9/9, Dell M805/905 on 9/16, and Dell-Cisco Blade Switches on 9/23. If you’re not able to make these live, submit your questions ahead of time to the featured speaker by starting a thread on the bottom of the chat pages then check back later to see what the attendees had to say.
• The Blades Installation Cookbook offers a detailed step by step guide for hardware setup. Tools to customize your OS installation scripts include the Deployment Toolkit page and Systems Build and Update Utility demos.
• For monitoring the chassis and blades, the Blades Management page is a good starting point that includes transcripts of chat discussions and demonstrations of remote monitoring and management with the iDRAC and CMC.
• Blade Power Monitoring with ITA highlights the OpenManage console with the OpenManage Systems Management page being the starting point for all products and demos. There are also many resources to help with Switching to Dell Systems Management.
• Details of using FlexAddress to assign network identities to slots rather than physical blades have been covered in previous chats and a demo.

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Blades Web Chat Topics

Every Tuesday at 3pm Central, we host a chat session around IT topics. These three Web chats focused on the following blade areas:

9-9-08 - Bulking up Dell Blades

9-16-08 - Dell PowerEdge M805 and M905 Blades

9-23-08 - Dell/Cisco Blade Switch Solutions