MSA 2012i

Windows Server 2008 R2 HyperV Clustering

I have a on going project bringing in 12 new servers and a c7000 HP Blade Enclosure and a MSA 2012i going on right now and one of the interesting things I have done is to setup 2 Windows 2008 R2 HyperV Servers connecting to a HP MSA 2012i iSCSI Storage device and using the new HyperV Clustering in the Failover Clustering piece of 2008 R2. This is my first attempt at Failover Clustering of any kind and it has been pretty simple actually. It was some trial and error with getting the connection presented to the servers off the MSA but it was a matter of the Lun numbers. I was trying to present the LUN to each server with the same ID. I found that is I add a different ID for each one on the different connections it works then. There is a good article out on how to set this up and here it is. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732181(WS.10).aspx#BKMK_Connect

 Til Later just Roger

HP Train Part 2

Well it has been a crazy last week and a half. I went to the HP Train Event in Houston but before I got started on the Wednesday evening before I left my wife’s second oldest son was in a car wreck. He made it through the wreck banged up and a couple of cuts but ok. His car not so much much but he is ok that is the main thing. So that took up much of Wednesday and Thursday. I left for Houston on Sunday morning and it was a nice pleasant drive down. I know why drive well I don’t fly and do my flying in a car. I actually enjoy driving so it was good.

The Course I was in at the HP Train event was on MSA 2000 series devices and EVA’s. I have some MSA 2012’s out already but this was a good what am I missing class and also to look at the Fiber MSA’s. The ones I have out are the iSCSI version. I also got my first look at EVA’s and what you can do with them and how they are setup. They are not so bad now that they have a Smart Start Utility for this and it is pretty straight forward. I guess the next step will be is the couple of tests that relate to this course. Oh Boy I love tests so much. But that finished up Friday and it was a nice pleasent trip home which i was ready for. I have some projects coming down the pike but more on that wehn I can talk about them.

Til later just Roger

Server 2008 HyperV, HP BL 480c and failover with a MSA 2012i

I know I have been talking about the project I have going on at one customer site. We got a HP c7000 and in this we have 2 BL 480c Blades with dual QC CPU’s 48 Gig RAM, 4 NICs and 4 146–HDs and we also have a HP MSA 2012i iSCSI SAN device with 12 450 Gig 10k SAS Drives in it and we had 2 GBE2c switches in the c7000 for the interconnects.

One of the goals from the customer was to have complete failover for the networking as we will be running Virtual Servers on the 2008 Servers on the host machines the BL 480c’s. So with help from Jason one of our network guys and fellow blogger on this site we got the failover working. I have to admit I am not the greatest with networking so his help was much appreciated on this project. He has been in the process at this site of moving in a new core network switching using the HP Blade Switches is what I will call them but I think they are PROCURVE 5400ZL Switches.

How we ended up doing it was pretty simple as we took the GBE2 switches out and put HP passthrough modules in the c7000. When we would down one of the GBE2c switches the failover would not work as Jason thought the response of the switches was not fast enough. But we used HP Teaming on 2 of the NICs for the HyperV networking and we teamed the other 2 NICs for the SAN networking that would be handling the iSCSI traffic to the MSA. We had spread the MSA connections and the team connections across multiple switches on the HP Switch Blade. We had 2 Virtual Servers running on each Blade Server and when I downed the MSA Array Controller the servers keep working as the other Array picked the failed Array of the MSA on the fly and then Jason pulled a switch and everything just keep working because of the NIC Teaming. I know this in not detailed a lot but it was all pretty simple actually and not that complicated once you get to the end result. But it is working.

Til later just Roger