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.

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status for 2012 & 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design

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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.

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status for 2012 & 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design

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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!

About Mike Mills

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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.

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status for 2012 & 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design

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