blade servers

Faulty ESX USB keys from HP

Hi guys, I wanted to chat about something I’ve run into in my experiences. Faulty USB keys for ESX! As you know, VMware has the ability to load onto a server using a USB key instead of hard drives. Well I have now seen an issue with this, not with VMware so much as with HP branded ESX USB keys.

If you bought ESX USB keys from HP along with your servers you might have a faulty set of keys. Apparently the keys start to fail and the servers either freeze or cause weird errors like the VMware purple screen of death. I personally ran into this on over 40 HP blades using HP USB keys.

Luckily the good folks at HP have acknowledge this and have posted a fix for this. HP will send you a replacement USB key if you find that you have an issue. They also have posted what to look for on the USB key to determine in advance whether you have one of these faulty keys.

You can check out the following links for more information:

• (USB Key w. ESXi e - bad experiences)

• Warning — faulty HP ESXi USB Keys!

• (HP Knowledge Base article)

-RP

Direct Connect SAS storage for HP Blades

Hello again folks, in the SMB world, especially during these economic times, we can’t always spend all the money we want on storage. Generally customers are limited to looking at some pretty low end storage options.

I have always been a proponent of usings Blades in the SMB along with virtualization to reduce costs for the SMB. But what do you do for storage? Well the most common thing people look at is iSCSI vs FC. Usually people end up going the iSCSI route due to it’s lower cost factor.

Well another thing you can look at is direct attached storage. HP offers something called Direct Connect SAS storage for their HP BladeSystem. This can give you up to 420 TB of zoned or up to 192 TB of shared storage. This can be an attractive alternative for the SMB.

The way it works is by use of controllers installed in the blade severs along with blade switch interconnects and then finally either an MSA2000sa for shared storage or an MDS600 for direct attached storage. You can read more about the solution from HP here.

-RP

Power Planning

One of the most overlooked items during a server implementation is power planning. I have seen many administrators get excited about ordering their new servers or other network equipment, plan the outage for the day of the install and then once they have all their equipment realize that they can’t even plug them in because they either have the wrong type of outlets or they don’t have enough circuits or UPS’.

 Here are a few tips to follow when power planning:

• Always get dual power supplies for your servers, it doesn’t cost much more to purchase these and it’s worth the extra money.
• Always plug dual power supplies into separate UPS’ and plug the UPS’ into separate circuits. There is no point plugging them into the same UPS and/or circuit. This gives you a single point of failure and basically defeats the purpose of having two power supplies in the first place.
• Power strips for racks with readouts for the amount of amps being drawn are great for seeing how much of a load your are placing on circuit. Many different companies sell these.
• A cheap meter for measuring the draw on a piece of equipment can be your best friend in troubleshooting issues. Sometimes a large enough power spike during boot up can trip a breaker and you can use a meter to determine what’s going on.
• Use an online power calculator before your installation day to determine how many circuits, UPS’, power cords, etc. you will need for all of your equipment. Then budget accordingly. It can be quite embarrasing if you don’t think about this beforehand and you get stuck up the creek without a paddle on the implementation day.
• If you are worried about increased power costs, look into blade systems and virtualization. The amount of money and energy you can save is quite substantial.
• Do some reading on electricity if you don’t understand all the terms. There are plenty of resources out there on the web.

-RP

Server consolidation

There is one commonality here in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Lots of servers, using a lot of power. Being a province that generates our own Hydro, we have pretty cheap electricity without having to worry about the expense of power like other provinces or states do. However this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be a little more green to help out the rest of the world.

It is quite often I will see server rooms filled with racks and racks of servers with no heed paid to virtualization at all. A lot of people believe it or not, still haven’t even heard of it as they are busy focusing on other things in their business and don’t keep their ear to the ground in the IT world. It’s at times like these that I like to point out the benefits of virtualization.

You can easily take an HP C3000 blade enclosure (this enclosure, aka the “shorty” is targeted at the SMB market) and fill it with server blades, a tape blade and a storage blade, and consolidate racks worth of servers down into 6U of space. Then you can install VMWare ESX Server on the server blades and potentially have tons of virtual machines per blade server. If you haven’t looked into these technologies lately I suggest you do, they are the next big thing in IT and have just been getting better and better.

 By doing this you can save your company money on power, thermal, physical space constraints, and sheer amount of servers and racks you have to buy. Also by implementing VMWare on a blade enclosure, you increase the level of redundancy you have greatly over what you would typically have in standard configuration of one server installation per rack mounted server by taking advantage of the features available to you in VMWare and in the blade enclosure.

 -RP