Dec 05

HP Discover 2011

HP made several announcments at HP Discover 2011 – Vienna, some new backup kit, some additions to HP Data Protector and a new NAS based device, all designed to optimize the information infrastructure.

  • The B6200 StoreOnce Backup System is the fastest deduplication solution in its class and the only one to offer complete high availability and scale-out design.
  • HP Data Protector with StoreOnce Deduplication has efficiency and performance unmatched by other backup software.
  • HP X5000 G2 Network Storage Systems provides high availability, turnkey setup, and native integration into Microsoft Windows server environments.

 

Video chat on the B6200:

I’ve been looking forward to the inbuilt software StoreOnce Deduplication in HP Data Protector, it will allow SMB’s to just buy a cheap RAID array and leverage the StoreOnce Dedup enterprise class features within their environments.

The X5000 looks superb, its a 3u, two active node device with a bit of storage attached.  Looks rather natty, can support upto 32TB of SAS drives, is expandable with D2600 or D2700 shelves and comes with Windows Storage Server which includes SiS.  It’s basically the E5000 appliance with a different image on the blades.  This looks to be good for a nice and easy clustered file server for SMB’s.

 

Video from HPStorageGuy

Lots more to come on HP Discover 2011

Nov 17

VMware Certified Professional 5 – the ins and outs

I’ve just sat and passed my VCP 5 exam and thought I’d pass on some of the things I did to prepare for this.

  1. Home Lab – Luckily I have a couple of HP DL based servers to be able to deploy a vSphere 5 (which can be downloaded with 60 day evaluation licenses) environment and test everything I could think of.  I think it is essential to have a home lab so you can deploy all the VMware products, play with then, break them, and learn how to fix it.  If you don’t have access to servers, download VMware workstation and deploy ESX to that.  The main thing is, try to implement everything you can so you get to see all the options and settings.
  2. Mock Exam on VCP 5 – this gives you the best illustration of the actual exam, practise, practise, and practise.  There are quite a few mock exams on the web, some aren’t as accurate as they should be, so definitely use the official one.
  3. Exam Blueprint on VCP 5 – get to know this well, it does point you in the right direction when looking for things to study and test on your home lab.
  4. YouTube – there is some good videos on YouTube that can be of help.
  5. Home Lab – 🙂 yes, I know I said it in Number 1, but I can’t stress how important it is to have a home lab setup, it makes life so much easier.
  6. Take the training course! If you’re new to this take VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage [V5.0] or Whats New [V5.0] if you have VCP4 already
  7. Mastering VMware vSphere 5 is available from Amazon in real paperback or not so real kindle/ebook.  I found the version 4 book brilliant, and the version 5 is even better.  Scott knows what he is talking about and it’s a nice easy read, rather than a boring technical manual.

You will have to switch into study mode and dedicate quite a bit of time to learning all the ins and outs of vSphere to be able to have enough knowledge to go into this exam with confidence.  Best of luck!

Oct 10

HP Firmware Updates – How to do it the HP recommended way

So, you manage and maintain HP Servers (DL, BL, Matrix Environments etc.) and you’re usual firmware update procedure is to chuck on the HP Smart Update Firmware DVD when you think you should and just update all the firmware on the server. Probably not the best way to do it, but I bet a lot of you out there do it just like that. HP has produced a nice white paper: HP Proliant Firmware Management and Planning Guide – Best Practises. This is their take on how to properly implement firmware upgrades across there environments.

Planning firmware updates rather than just doing them whenever you feel like makes the update process smoother, with less likely hood of unwanted downtime.  You probably have a patching strategy,
why not one for firmware updates?  The HP white paper helps to create this update strategy, providing information on keeping your environment updated and running as it should, plus an outline for creating the update plan which should be followed before updating your server environment. It also contains information on:

  • Updated best practices for firmware deployment
  • Update regularity
  • Creation of baselines
  • Handling of interim and critical updates
  • Differences in planning based on environments including single server, enclosure, distributed data center, large enterprise and CloudSystem Matrix
  • Driver dependencies for all types of firmware updates
  • How to gather information for reports
  • Interim updates for Windows PSPs with associated advisories for updating PSPs to the latest version from as far back as PSP 7.00

Check it out here:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c02967678/c02967678.pdf

 

Oct 05

Hyper-V Windows Server 8 – New Features

Just found this blog post from Michael Otey of WindowsITPro and thought it rather interesting, so I’ve re-blogged it for your enjoyment! 🙂

At the recent Windows Server Workshop at the Microsoft campus in Redmond Washington Jeff Woolsey, Principle Program Manager Lead for Windows Virtualization in the Windows Server and Cloud division presented the new features in the next version of their Hyper-V virtualization platform. In the introduction to the workshop Jeffery Snover, Distinguished Engineer and the Lead Architect for the Windows Server Division made the bold statement that with Microsoft it’s the third release is where Microsoft really gets it right and with regard to what Microsoft demonstrated in the next version of Hyper-V this is definitely true. The upcoming Hyper-V 3.0 release that’s included in the next version of Windows Server has closed the technology gap with VMware’s vSphere.

Hyper-V 3.0 Scalability

The days when Hyper-V lagged behind VMware in terms of scalability are a thing of the past. The new Hyper-V 3.0 meets or exceeds all of the scalability marks that were previously VMware-only territory. Hyper-V 3.0 hosts support up to 160 logical processors (where a logical processor is either a core or a hyperthread) and up to 2 TB RAM. On the VM guest side, Hyper-V 3.0 guests will support up to 32 virtual CPUs with up to 512 GB RAM per VM. More subtle changes include support for guest NUMA where the guest VM has processor and memory affinity with the Hyper-V host resources. NUMA support is important for ensuring scalability increases as the number of available host processors increase.

Multiple Concurrent Live Migration and Storage Live Migration

Perhaps more important than the sheer scalability enhancements are the changes in Live Migration and the introduction of Storage Live Migration. Live Migration was introduced in Hyper-V 2.0 which came out with Windows Server 2008 R2. While it filled an important hole in the Hyper-V feature set it wasn’t up to par with the VMotion capability provided in vSphere. Live Migration was limited to a single Live Migration at a time while ESX Server was capable of performing multiple simultaneous VMotions. In addition, vSphere supported a similar feature called Storage VMotion which allowed a VM’s storage to be moved to new locations without incurring any downtime. Hyper-V 3.0 erases both of these advantages. Hyper-V 3.0 supports multiple concurrent Live Migrations. There are no limits to the number of concurrent Live Migrations that can take place with Hyper-V 3.0. In addition, Hyper-V 3.0 also provides full support for Storage Live Migration where a virtual machine’s files ( the configuration, virtual disk and snapshot files) can be moved to different storage locations without any interruption of end user connectivity to the guest VM.

Microsoft also threw in one additional twist that vSphere has never had. Hyper-V 3.0 has the ability to perform Live Migration and Storage Live Migration without the requirement of a shared storage on the backend. The removal of this requirement really helps bring the availability advantages of Live Migration to small and medium sized businesses that came afford a SAN or don’t want to deal with the complexities of a SAN. The ability to perform Live Migration without requiring shared storage really sets Hyper-V apart from vSphere and will definitely be a big draw – especially for SMBs that haven’t implemented virtualization yet.

VHDX, ODX, Virtual Fiber Channel & Boot from SAN

Another important enhancement with Hyper-V 3.0 was the introduction of a new virtual disk format called VHDX. The new VHDX format breaks the 2TB limit that was present in the older VHD format and pushes the maximum size of the virtual disk up to 16 TB per VHDX. The new format also provides improved performance, support for larger block sizes and is more resilient to corruption.

Hyper-V 3.0 also supports a feature called Offloaded Date Transfer (ODX). ODX enables Hyper-V to take advantage of the storage features of a backend shared storage subsystem. When performing file copies on an ODX enabled SAN the OS hands off all of the data transfer tasks to the SAN providing much high file copy performance with zero to minimal CPU utilization. There is no special ODX button. Instead ODX works in the backend. ODX requires the storage subsystem to support ODX.

Companies that use fiber channel SANs will appreciate the addition of the virtual Fiber Channel support in the Hyper-V guests. Hyper-V 3.0 guests can have up to four virtual fiber channel host bus adapters. The virtual HBAs appear in the VMs as devices very like virtual NICs and other virtual devices. Hyper-V VMs will also be able to boot from both fiber channel and iSCSI SANs.

Extensible Virtual Switch & NIC Teaming

In keeping par with the sweeping changes in Hyper-V’s compute capabilities and storage Microsoft also made a some of significant enhancements to Hyper-V’s networking capabilities. First, they updated the virtual switch that’s built into the Hyper-V hypervisor. The new virtual switch has a number of new capabilities multi-tenant capability as well as the ability to provide minimum and maximum bandwidth guarantees. In addition to these features the new virtual switch is also extensible. Microsoft provides a API that allows capture, filter and forwarding extensions. To ensure the high quality of these virtual switch extensions Microsoft will be initiating a Hyper-V virtual switch logo program.

Another overdue feature that will be a part of Windows Server 8 is the built-in ability to provide NIC teaming natively in the operating system. VMware’s ESX Server has provided NIC teaming for some time. Prior to Windows Server 8 you could only get NIC teaming for Windows via specialized NICs from Broadcom and Intel. The new NIC teaming works across heterogonous vendor NICs and can provide support for load balancing as well as failover.

The Magic Number 3

As Jeffery Snover pointed out three does seem to be the magic number – at least for Hyper-V. Hyper-V 3.0 brings Microsoft’s virtualization on par with VMware’s vSphere. Businesses that are just getting into to virtualization or those businesses that may be bulking at VMware’s latest price increases will find Hyper-V to be a very cost effective and highly competitive alternative.

http://www.windowsitpro.com/blog/michael-oteys-blog-21/virtualization/windows-server-8-hyperv-30-evens-odds-vsphere-140573

Sep 27

SAN/IQ 9.5 Updates

Here are some new features being introduced in SAN/IQ 9.5 for the HP P4000 range:

CMC

SAN Status Homepage is implemented which shows a summary of multiple management groups, rather than at the moment having to login to each group manually.  Good for use on a NOC when monitoring & managing multiple groups.

VSA

Scripted installations for ease of implementation of VSA’s, need to deploy your VSA’s that you got with your multi-site san, just use scripted configuration to allow consistent installations to multiple sites.

VMware Application Managed Snapshots

Triggering a snapshot in the P4000 will cause your vCenter server to hardware snap those VM’s in the data store in a queisced state.  Schedule those snapshots in the P4000 and you’ll be taking the same scheduled snapshots within VMware.  Attach the P4000 snapshot to an ESX server and you will see the VM’s in there, all in a nice consistent state.

Remote Copy

Performance increases, speed of volume scans reduced to seconds which allows a more aggressive schedule of snapshots & copies to secondary/remote sites.

Peer Motion

HP’s Peer Motion support is being introduced across multiple products in the HP line, and it’s the VSA’s turn now.  This allows you the ability to migrate data online between different tiers of storage without disruption to service.