Cisco is having to replace all the B440 blades that are deployed:
Update:
The firmware upgrade initially prescribed in this Field Notice has successfully detected FET failures and shut down servers, preventing a potential thermal event. Since this upgrade was released, however, a FET failure on a UCS B440 Blade Server has resulted in a second incident as described above. Cisco is directly contacting UCS B440 Blade Server customers and will replace UCS B440 Blade Servers currently deployed at customer sites. Cisco is making UCS B440 Blade Server hardware modifications, and a hardware replacement program has been launched. No other UCS hardware is affected.
Information is from a Cisco public website: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/ts/fn/634/fn63430.html

This was really cool.  It was literally the most impressive thing at HP discover for me.  It also tied in the Instant On Enterprise theme or slogan in seeing the power cloud maps and automation in the Matrix OS…  In the past as working as a customer and consultant I was able to implement and administrate Insight Control, however I never had the chance to use Insight Orchestratration.

Some Quick Notes that I took are:

• The Matrix software is version 6.3 running on a DL 380 Central Management Server
• Blades Chassis with Flex-10 Virtual Connect/Flex-Fabric…
• All HP Storage is Supported even Netapp and EMC…
• To use Storage Provisioning Manager you have to use an EVA or 3Par, I found it odd not 3Par Lefthand

Here is what we did in Lab…I’ll try to get slides, btw besides your workstation with a takehome lab manual they provided the information on a 17inch notebook as well.  It was really done Vegas style.

1) Creating Cloud Maps-  Inside Insight Orchestration Designer we created two templates on for physical servers on for virtual servers.  On the template we dropped the logical group objects for networks, storage, and servers being physical or virtual then published them.

2) Self Service Portal- We logged into this, and were presented with history of requests, running services, and resource utiliziation.  You can specify here in the self service portal also what users have access to what templates.  Next we created a service this creates a request to deploy your cloud map.  Once this is done the only thing left is to approve.  We approved and our infastructure was automatically deployed.  No lab hangs up.  It worked flawlessly.

3)  Importing Cloud Maps-  This was the coolest thing we did in lab, it really demonstrated the power and dynamic capability of the tool, definately makes you think Instant on Enterprise.  We logged into Insight Orchestration Designer and imported in a very elaborate cloud map.  It just showed how easy it would to replicate private cloud infrastructures through the process of importing and exporting cloud maps.

4) Storage Provisioning Manager and SPE –  As stated earlier this is the part that is only supported with EVA and 3Par.  It manages storage provisioning in the Matrix OS.  

 Two main use models are:

• Pre-poulated model the adminstrator populates the SPM catalog with storage services to be exposed to server management software, then sets access rights…Matrix then enables an administrator to request storage, which is sent to SPM as a storage services requests.  SPM then provides canidate services, and the administrator selects one or more apporiate volume services to fulfill the set of goals(requests)
• Request Based Model-  Administrator uses Matrix OS to request storage before it is imported or created.  The Administrator then adds the arrays and volumes to fulfil the goal.

In class we modified SPE (Storage Pool Entities) and changed storage type, portability, OS, and added a volume. 

Insight Capacity Planner/Advisor- 

• We created a planning senario selecting 20 legacy then gathering the performance statistics we could do senario forecasts with entering in CPU, Memory, Network I/O, and Disk I/O growth rate. 
• We also created a planning senario in which we consolidated to VMs
• Power and Price were also reportable and comparable

A lot.  I got to see in the flesh at HPDiscover last week, couldn’t really talk about it before then… So many new features and enhancements for one code release upgrade for existing x400 customers, that is the first thing that came to mind as I poured over all the new features in the P6000 from HP, not to mention the P6000 itself.  HP released the P6300 and P6500 looks like there isn’t an option as of yet for the 8400 replacement in terms of cache.  Can only guess 3Par is the probley the reason why…

Here is my summation, I am probley missing some:

1) Thin Provisioning –  This needed to be done, glad to see it is finally here.

2) Dynamic Capacity Management – This is free now.

3) Business Copy – Support for VMFS volumes; also support for large luns

4) Different Connectivity Options – You can get different connectivity options like iSCSI FCoE FCP this is nice

5) Shrink live luns

6) Change vRaid on Fly (can’t be thin provisioned)

7) Move Lun between diskgroup –  This is great; I wouldn’t want autotiering anyhow

Drive Form Factor shelves are either LFF 12 drives or 24 SFF SAS

9) 6Gb Sas Connectivity for drive shelves…

10) Multiple connectivity option e.g. fibre channel, iscsi, FCoE, not to mention combo option e.g. fibre channel and iSCSI

What’s Missing?

Still not sure on VAAI support and where this is headed

What do I have to do to get there?

Buy a P6000, or upgrade your existing commandview and xcs firmware

Anything you don’t like?

Yeah, I don’t like that they took the EVA4400 controller design and implemented it in the P6000 design with 2 controllers and 1 shelf.  I liked the previous EVA6400/8400 design much better.

How about the price?

The price is significantly less

Yesterday I found out I am going to Vegas for the HP 2011 Discover Conference.  The first thing I did was start the registration process. I heard a rumor last week that a lot of sessions are already filled and I can confirm this is true.  A side note there is so much stuff left though, you could easily spend two full weeks.

For me the highlight is labs. I could only pick two labs per stated in the registration system this was somewhat disappointed as I tried to originally schedule 5.  I scheduled Hands on with the Blade System Matrix and Hands on with 3Par Advanced.  It was really hard to narrow this down to two…I am very excited to about E5000 best practices session.  I love the idea of the E5000.  If you haven’t had a chance to read about it check it out here it’s very innovative.

Recently I was helping a customer architect a solution and I went back to the Best Practices for Vpshere and the EVA you can find it here:  http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA1-2185ENW.pdf

I thought I would make a quick summation and comment as some of it seems neglected in terms of being updated.

1. When creating hosts in commandview create them as Type: VMware
2. Use a single disk group with the same size disks and the largest possible disk group
3. Single Diskgroup sparing is sufficent unless MTTR is > 7 days
4. Don’t use VRaid 6 – Vraid 5 provides adequate redundancy
5. When using disks of varying performance characteristics still use a single diskgroup
6. Balance your VMFS Luns across both controllers for ownership with alternating failback and failover policies  read more here (http://www.ivobeerens.nl/?p=465)
7. Configure Round Robin advanced parameters to IOPS=1….I dont think HP is right here this was fixed fixed in Vpshere 4 update 1; This shouldnt be necessary
8. When using DR groups, ensure that DR groups managing controllers are spread across controllers
9. Use less than 16 VMDKs per VMFS datastore
10. Use the same lunid per host per lun
11. Create VMFS datastores through Vcenter for proper alignment
12. For heavy i/o load vms use the paravirtualized virtualized virtual adapters for the VM data Luns
13. Verify data drives for windows 2003 machines within os for proper alignment
14. Set Round Robin multipathing on your hosts and then reboot; dont forget to set your Microsoft clusters to MRU here is the quick and easy command:

esxcli nmp satp setdefaultpsp --satp VMW_SATP_ALUA --psp VMW_PSP_RR

Issue:

Recently I came across a situation with a customer, where they were experiencing sparactic LUN drops in there Vsphere clusters.  This occured in 4.1 and 4.0.  Also, what is unique is this occurred between two HP storage arrays…The luns would disappear for a few minutes than come back.  I looked at it from the angle of performance problems in there SAN enviroment.

These x028 errors aren’t unique to HP Arrays shown below other Manufactures seem to be fighting them as well including EMC and IBM you can read about it here:

Looking at the vmkernel logs lots of lines followed like:

Coming from an EVA background 3PAR was very new to me.  Right away there were several features that stuck out that I really like:

1)  VAAI Integration –  3PAR fully supports VAAI with its VAAI plugin for Vsphere.  You can read more about that here

2) Rapid Provisioning –  This is perhaps my favorite thing about 3PAR, from suffering through pain in LUN management and presentations in ESX clusters the past several years….3PAR offers Autonomic Groups simplifying volume provisioning by the use of Autonomic Host Groups or Volume Groups when a new host is added to a host group all volumes are autonomically exported to the new host, likewise when a new volume is added to a volume group it is autonomically exported to all hosts in the group.  This can save hundreds of clicks literally.

3) Scalability-  I like how you can add additional controller nodes through upgrade paths in the F400, T400, T800

4) Hardware Based Thin Provisioning – Utilization of 3PAR Gen3 ASIC enables fat to thin without impacting workloads  hardware > software Also thin provisioning in Oracle

5) Replication – built in Gigabit ethernet ports not only can you add a card for Fiber Channel FCIP replication, you can use the built in Gigabit ethernet ports for replication….Remote copy = easy mode not hard to setup.

6) Really Active/Active – Unlike other midtier arrays from other manufactors who have both optimized and non optimized paths from the controller to the LUN all 3PAR paths are optimized.  This is similar to high end arrays like Hitachi and Symetrix.  You can read about it here on page 4
What I was impressed by is this holds true in both F Series and T Series systems. 

More To Follow Soon…