Hi,

Checkout this whitepaper on IBM’s HyperSwap. The product is somewhat 1.0 and a little crippled (from my point of view anyway) but a large giant told me that most of the complicated stuff will be fixed in next version……

Bgrds,
FOG

Hi!

If you are looking for some information on HP OneView I recommend that you take a look at this site.

It is amazing how fast the development of OneView is progressing. I started using it back in January when we installed two HP C7000’s and 13 blades. Since then I have met a VP from the group which owns the OneView product inside HP, which was very clear on where HP was taking this product and how much HP is listening to the customers regarding features and development.

Now that version 2.0 is about to be released (FAQ here) I am really excited to see the new features, especially the features around storage (3PAR and the SAN). Having a single pane of glass to manage and monitor your whole infrastructure is great. The only “bad” thing is that of course OneView is mostly bound to HP products. It can monitor some third-party switches but with limited feature set.

Now, I guess we will have to wait for few more weeks for 2.0! 🙂

Bgrds,
FOG

Disclaimer: I do not work for HP or a HP Partner. My views here are my own and have nothing to do with my employer!

Howdy,

If you are a user of the IBM San Volume Controller and/or the Storwize you should really checkout this announcement.

What I found most interesting was HyperSwap – now you can present a single volume from two different storage controllers which use metro mirror for a two way replication (although I do not have any more details on this). This is something like the Active-Active function in EMC’s Metro VPLEX installations. Cool stuff!

Bgrds,
FOG

Howdy,

I recently started using a “old” (4 year old) desktop tower to play Diablo 3 in co-op with my son. Last weekend I dug it up and installed Windows 10 on a spare 256GB SSD I had.

Damn! I must say they have actually out-done what they did when going from XP to Vista (I have to mention, I am probably one of the ten people in the world who actually liked Windows Vista:)). Everything is so smooth, even on hardware this old.

The new start menu is what the start menu should have been in Windows 8.1. However, after using Windows 10 I guess I have to forgive them….can’t wait until I can deploy this on my work laptop.

I have yet to use the browser they ship with it though….my Chrome habit is not something I see my self getting away from anytime soon!

Anyway….I must say, if you have a extra machine lying around (or some resources to run a VM), I suggest that you go grab the Windows 10 and give it a test run.

Bgrds,
FOG

Howdy all,

I just finished a plan for redesigning/rebuilding one of the environments at work.

It is truly amazing how much time goes in designing, getting specifications, reading up on technical material, talking to industry experts and getting quotes from our server vendor.

There are more then 6 months since I started this planning and design phase with my colleagues. Our vendor has probably lost count of how many quotes I have requested due to this and I am amazed they actually still pick up the phone when I call them 🙂

What I am getting at is that often when we, the technical staff, start on a redesign projects small or large we are quite often stuck thinking about how awesome the newest CPU chips are or how fast some new memory tech is. When working on hardware refresh projects we are often replacing hardware that is three generations behind the new stuff. Speed is most often not the issue. Everything today revolves around software. We have to design around software, be it licenses or some other software flaw (or feature!).

After going through yet another project like this one might wonder – while we still have on-premise servers, would it be better to just “rent” hardware resources?

A thought for us all….

Bgrds,
FOG

Hi,

Recently we were flashing the firmware of few of our HP Proliant BL460c G9 blades.

One of the blades seemed to finish flashing the firmware (BIOS/Power Controller/iLO) and I went on to reboot it.

However when I tried to reboot it the blade never finished posting (it never got on to the second post screen).

The solution is very simple. Run the reset BIOS procedure (dip 6 on, blade power on, wait until you see messages on the screen saying you can turn the blade off, reset dip). Whola….the machine will finish the boot process 🙂

Also – during the firmware update process, don’t worry if the machine will reboot a couple of times after you reboot it when you have finished flashing…it is normal!

Bgrds,
FOG

Hi,

Recently I have been working on a problem (along with the infrastructure team at work) where we were having some performance issues.

Since we do not have IBM’s TPC product I had installed stor2rrd a while back. This tool has proved to be invaluable during our debugging and I highly recommend that you install and use it if you do not have TPC (or any other performance monitoring tool) for your storage infrastructure (and are using IBM SVC/Storwize).

It uses a tool called svcperf from IBM to collect the performance data and then writes the statistic it gathers in RRD files. Although this tool does not have any advanced features it makes it easy to see how your storage is performing.

However it seems that IBM has stopped developing svcperf but hopefully XORUX will keep it up-to-date (at least the data collection part) or re-writes their own product to have native support for collecting the data from SVC/Storwize based products.

Bgrds,
FOG

……read “Virtualizing Oracle Databases on vSphere” from VMware Press!

It is well written and managed to maintain my focus throughout the whole book. Probably one of the better books I have read on virtualization….9/10.

I am currently planning to virtualize a large Oracle database environment from an old HA cluster to a new VMware vSphere environment.

The book gives you loads of valuable information on what to look out for and different settings to give attention to. It also has a brilliant performance tuning chapter (but don’t thing this book will turn you into a performance tuning god) that gives you loads of stuff to help you maintain your performance while migrating over to your new fancy virtualized infrastructure.

The book will get a spot on my table until this project will be finished.

Bgrds,
FOG

Hi,

Cormac Hogan wrote very intersting blog posts on VMware VVols that everyone should read.

vSphere 6.0 Storage Features – Virtual Volumes and Migrations and Virtual Volumes – Deep dive.

Check it out – This explains quite a lot about VVols.

Bgrds,
FOG