Virtualization Tips » HP

A comparison of Blade management tools for Cisco vs HP

Brian — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 18:22:30 +0000

This is a conversation that gets asked a lot when discussing the platforms with customers. Can you explain to my why Cisco UCS is easier to manage and what tools do I need to use on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. The answer is really easy with Cisco UCS, you just need to use UCS manager. For HP the conversation becomes more splintered, sure you can do pretty much anything on HP blades that you can do on UCS. But how many tools or management points do you have to touch to accomplish these same things. Below I have attempted to list common tasks that you would need to do for setup and on going management of a blade enclosure and blades within.

Cisco UCS Manager – Does all the following in one tool

Blade Chassis mgmt
CIMC console connections
Hardware Monitoring
Firmware updates – chassis, FEX modules, blades and adapters
QOS
Network Mgmt
Service profiles for blade identities
SAN connection setup

Roll Based Access Controls – Can assign ID’s access to all or just allow server, network or SAN access

HP Blades – using Virtual Connect modules of any flavor

Blade Chassis mgmt. – Onboard Administrators (OA)
iLO console connections – OA
Hardware Monitoring – HP SIM
Firmware updates – HP SIM, FDT or currently used tool
Network Mgmt – Virtual Connect Manager (VCM)
Server profiles – Virtual Connect Manager (VCM)
SAN connection setup – Virtual Connect Manager
Roll Based Access Controls (RBAC) – need to configure logins per Tool

If you elected to use the new Cisco FEX modules for HP Blade chassis then the following would be affected.

Network Mgmt / profiles – no profiles, would use physical address from Blades. Port configs done at 5K level. Blades auto map to ports on FEX similar to pass through connections.
SAN connection setup – Would be done vid FCoE through the 5K switches
Network QOS – Done on 5K switches and tagged if possible in Operating Systems (ESXi 5 does support 802.1p)

If you have anything that I left off of this list drop me a note in the comments and I will update to keep accurate.

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.

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Why does it take HP so long to integrate their products

Brian — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 23:16:44 +0000

I was talking with a fellow VMware nerd today about cloud and infrastructure gear. And I can’t help but wonder why it takes HP so long to execute on integrating their products, mostly around the support tools. Look HP owns a complete stack now, network, compute, storage and software. Along with their suites of tools that you need to use to manage all these devices independently. To me this is their biggest failure and does not appear to be getting fixed anytime soon.

This is a big bonus of working Cisco UCS because there is just one place that I need to go to configure, manage, patch a blade environment. With HP I might have to use the Onboard Administrators, Virtual Connect manager and HP SIM. This seems like such a no brainer that HP could have fixed years ago, because the HP Blade systems have been around for years.

So if HP wants to rule the market in the Cloud era they need to reduce their tools into less management points. I should be able to do everything in one console for compute and if they could roll in storage to this also would be a huge win. And if they are properly motivated they can. Now a unified tool for automation of hardware that could reach into VMware with API’s would be the next big win. I know they are working on some of this but last that I saw it still sounded like there would be too many moving pieces.

So HP I challenge you to solve this issue with your massive amount of Talent, code and other resources. You need to become innovate again and make products that people want to own and desire for other reasons than you have a large install base and are cheaper.

If you want some examples you can read my post about the comparison of what tools it takes to manage HP vs Cisco blades chassis here.

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HP updates CIM drives with more visability

Brian — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 13:37:50 +0000

Since vSphere 4 came along VMware has been working with CIM (Computer Information Model) drivers to try and present up details about the underling hardware that vSphere is running on. Initially this was things like health of CPU, Memory and errors like a failed fan and such. But something that I always thought was missing is visibility into locally configured RAID volumes.

For example if you are running ESX(i) on a mirrored pair of local drives, if you are a shop that does not have very good hardware monitoring you might have no idea of the health of this mirror that vSphere is running on. So this becomes even more important with more shops experimenting with running certain workloads on local disk. With VMware and storage companies creating Virtual Storage Appliances that can run on these local disks and still provide the benefits of shared storage, this becomes a must to understand what is happening in your local disks environment.

With the latest batch of CIM drivers from HP they are now exposing some of these details. You can now see the drive configurations and status. The image below shows that a drive is rebuilding in the RAID config. This should be a feature that many HP shops will be happy to see. If you have noticed any other good features from this update leave a note in the comments for others.

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How to reset blade slot in HP C7000 chassis

Brian — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 15:51:09 +0000

This issue has not come up very often but with more admins working remotely these days and not being able to touch the hardware. This can be a life saver if no one is at the site or the process is slow. What I needed to do was reset the server in a particular slot and the reset option from the Onboard Administrator console was not getting the job done. So someone informed me of the following option. I need to do this for two different reasons that I can think of. First was due to a firmware issue that was making the blade power off a few seconds after turning it on and the second reason was due to an issue with the blades iLO card.

What the following command does is completely power off the blade slot and back on. This is the same thing as removing the blade from chassis and reseating it.

What you can do is to SSH into the chassis via the OA address that you would normally HTTP into.

The issue the following command to reset the specific blade. Just insert the bay number of the blade that is giving you the trouble.

reset server

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How to configure EMC PowerPath to work with HP EVA storage arrays

Brian — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 17:01:01 +0000

On one of the projects that I have been working on lately we have been replacing all of the existing EMC storage with HP Storage. I’m not going to go into which one I think is better or worse. I am just going to cover how PowerPath is able to work with other storage arrays also. So in my search to determine if I would be able to continue to use the existing PowerPath licenses that exist at the client or if they would need to use the base MPIO software that HP provides. To those that have used PowerPath in the past you would probably agree that it is a great MPIO application and has a lot of other features available also.

For system admins it can make things like monitoring the health of your SAN connections and identifying which LUN correlates to the disk that you need expanded so much easier. So for these reasons it would be best for them to continue to use PowerPath. I searched the web for feedback to see what others have been doing and was surprised to see nothing. There was really no feedback out there. I did find some details about using PowerPath/VE with HP arrays but this version is for Hypervisors not Windows servers.

So after some further digging I was able to determine that I could use PowerPath version 5.5 with Windows servers to manage MPIO with HP Storage arrays. It will work with both EVA and XP class storage from HP. There are 32 bit and 64 bit versions available and I was able to test on both Windows Server 2003 and 2008 so far.

The install of PowerPath is pretty straight forward, the only thing that you must do special is to select the custom install option. You can see from the image below that you will have a few options to choose from for 3rd party Array support. I selected both the HP XP and Hitachi support since they will be using both EVA and HP XP’s which are made by Hitachi in the environment. After a reboot and a quick vDisk assignment on the EVA the storage was showing up properly in Windows.

The only part that was left was to get used to how the storage details would be showing up in PowerPath. Now when your using EMC storage the LUN ID with show up in the LUN column and is nice and clear. But when using it with the HP EVA the only way to match up the windows disk to the vDisk on the EVA was to use the Device details listed for the disk within PowerPath. I took a snapshot of the screen below.

You then need to match up the Device details that you found in PowerPath with the vDisk on the EVA that you can see by using the Command View EVA console. You can see that the WW LUN Name for the vDisk matches up with the Device column inside of PowerPath and this will help you match up your vDisks with the Windows disks. This makes disk expansions and assigning disks with different Raid levels to the proper drive letter in Windows much easier.

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HP announced CloudStart solution private cloud in 30 days

Brian — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:49:53 +0000

HP today announced HP CloudStart, the industry’s first all-in-one solution for deploying an open and flexible private cloud environment within 30 days.

Built on an HP Converged Infrastructure, HP CloudStart simplifies and speeds private cloud deployments. Consisting of hardware, software and services, HP CloudStart empowers businesses to deliver pay-per-use services reliably and securely from a common portal, and it offers the ability to scale and deploy new services automatically. Real-time access to consumption and chargeback reports allows clients to operate their private clouds in the same fashion as a public cloud.

HP is promoting that they can deliver on the following basic principles of Cloud Computing.

Request a compute service via a portal
Have service provided immediately
Use the service without worrying about security, management, etc.
Scale or cancel the service
Get a regular report on consumption or chargeback

See full press release here.

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Some companies have the wrong sales pitch on Blade servers

Brian — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 03:00:15 +0000

This is not the first time that I have heard someone take a strange approach to pitching the use of blade servers to a application owner within their own organization. The other day I was in a design meeting that I was brought into the project mid-stream. The project was for a application that was getting new servers through Life Cycle. The engineer was recommending that they use several blade servers to virtualize all of the requested servers that are currently physical. So at this everything sounds fine and the Project Manager is on the same page.

This is where things drove off the rails. The engineer was suggesting that this app owner was going to have to purchase his 3 blades that would be needed to virtualize his servers and also pay for the entire cost of the C7000 blade enclosure and necessary networking modules. He was saying this guy is going to have to buy the bus so that other can ride on it late. This confuse the project manager to no end on how she was going to explain all this added cost to the app owner. Now I have heard this phrase and tactic before and it’s always confused me to the thinking behind it. Sure some one has to pay for the chassis but there are other ways to spread the cost out.

The first thing came to mind was there are certainly other chassis in the Enterprise that might have slots available for these blades. Have you looked into that option. Also what about speaking with others in Life cycle to see what other Blade server might need to be purchase soon and plan out a method of splitting the cost of the chassis evenly over the blades in the server. Sure if you don’t fill it up soon you have spent some extra money up front but your going to recover it back once you have filled all the slots in the Blades Chassis.

To make it even worse once presented with this crazy idea the project manager said I can not try and sell all of this additional cost to this person. I might as well just get him pricing on 3 standard rack mount servers. Well this was kind of the tipping point for me after about 10 minutes of this call that I had to step in and get some more background on how they got to this point.

I know there are various arguments for and against the use of Blade Servers but the direction for this organization is use Blades for everything possible. Only use a standard rack mount server when there is valid reasoning for it. And since they are moving all of the VMware hosts over to new blade servers there has to be a pretty good reason for not virtualizing a server in the first place. The data center is also very space constrained so Blades are the smart option at this point.

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Let’s talk EVA!

mike — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 02:41:39 +0000

I’d like to start discussing the storage I have at my work. I’ve had some good experiences in learning and working with it, and I’d like to share! I haven’t found alot specifically regarding working with the EVAs like I do daily, so I hope some folks find this useful!

So, as an overview for the environment, we currently have 3 8100 series and one 4400 series. EVAs arrays use two controllers, and our models are active/active. Our VMware environment at work is currently a VI3 schmorgesborg and we are planning an update (well migration) to vSphere. For SAN switches, we have older Mcdata’s that are workhorses! We manage them using EFCM software (also java, sigh).

HP provides Command View for EVA as the management tool for the EVAs. This installs and runs on Windows, and is now supported running in a VM as of the current release (9.2). Replication is handled with Business Copy and Continuous Access (separately licensed features). Automation of replication is handled using Replication Solutions Manager, which is a java-based App. :-/

For my next post, I’ll be giving a walkthrough of Command View and discuss how the EVAs we have are configured. Lots of screenshots too!

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I added more disks to HP MSA 2300 series storage today

Brian — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 01:35:47 +0000

Well I knew this day would come eventually, we had run out of space on this HP MSA. I knew going into this small project but this is the direction that the team took. So we purchased another 2 TB of space and I needed to add it to the configuration. We ended up buying 6 450 GB SATA disks to use in the MSA 2312sa unit. The drives were used to create one vDisk with just over 2 TB of usable space that was split up into 2 Datastores in VMware.

The configuration was a breeze just like the initial setup. The disks were placed evenly across the disk shelves and appeared into the console as expected. A couple of clicks later I had a vDisk setup and then created to volumes and assigned them to my hosts once I had created the Datastores from the first Host.

If you need to know more about how to setup these you can read my initial post on how to setup a HP MSA 2300 series array here.

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