blades

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

Check your thermals…

With it being summer, it’s got me thinking about heat on a daily basis. Especially server room heat. I’ve been through my fair share of server rooms and I’ve seen all sorts of solutions to the ever increasing heat problem. It seems more and more applications require a specific server to run; and more and more software requirements state that this piece of software can’t run on the same box as that piece of software. This leads to purchasing more servers and ends up leading to a lot of power draw and more heat in your server room.

Some people decide to cool servers the proper way by installing the proper cooling units into their server rooms, and other people decide to go the old fashioned way by leaving the server room door open or by putting a lot of home based oscillating fans in the room. Unfortunately this leads only to two very bad things, poor physical security and recirculation of hot air over the already warm servers.

If you need to cool your server room and don’t have the proper cooling, you seriously need to figure that into your next budget so you can have it. Also see what you can do to consolidate the roles of your servers so you have less servers taking up valuable space in your server room and also less servers generating heat.

 As I’ve mentioned before, Blade servers and VMWare are a very good idea for server consolidation. Not only are they good for saving power but they are great for keeping the heat down. Also with Windows 2008 out now and Hyper-V, there really is no reason not to try and virtualize even if you are not a VMWare expert. Any way you slice it the thermal savings will be substantial.

 -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