Archive for January, 2008
January 31, 2008 at 10:11 pm · Filed under rackmounts
I got a question from Mike the other day about swapping the array controller on a DL380G3.
“The array controller is yellow on the HP Insight Agents, something about a battery failure - does this mean I’ll loose my array settings/data when I swap the controller?”
This is a common error, basically the on-board battery on the array controller is reporting that it has failed. The battery simply needs to be replaced, you don’t need to replace the controller. If you do replace the controller everything should be fine, I’ve done it several times before. The RAID settings and drive information is stored on the controller and the drives, so if either is replaced the server should work as it did. Log a call with your hardware support guys and get the battery replaced, it will take a few minutes, whilst you’re there consider checking the firmware is up to date and note that when the server comes back, it can take a few hours for the cache to ‘recover’ whilst the battery comes online, so you might get an error in the event log.
January 31, 2008 at 9:08 am · Filed under rackmounts
There have been times when I’ve seen the alert ‘General Failure’ for power supply 1 on the HP insight agents.
General failure on power supply in the HP Proliant range of servers tends to mean that an aspect of that particular power supply isn’t happy. It doesn’t mean you need to replace the power supply, try the following:
- Reseat the power cable - unplug it and plug it back in
- Remove the power supply - count to five and plug it back in
These should fix the alert.
January 30, 2008 at 11:23 pm · Filed under Abn Amro merger
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/01/29/cnfortis129.xml
Fortis shares clocked up their biggest one-day gain for five years yesterday after the Dutch-Belgian bank tried to kill off speculation that it had been left financially crippled by its involvement in the £50bn takeover of ABN Amro.
The bank warned that full-year profits would fall some €200m (£149m) below expectations. But there would be no emergency rights issue, no dividend cut and no radical increase in bad debt provisions, the bank said. Even if “the most stringent” assumptions were made, Fortis said it would not breach its solvency or capital requirements.
The statement came in response to rumours about the bank’s financial strength. Fortis was part of the Royal Bank of Scotland-led consortium that bought ABN Amro last year, after a battle with Barclays. Some analysts have said Fortis overpaid for its share of the transaction. The bank is raising €24bn to pay for ABN’s domestic Dutch business.
Very cool and well done to Fortis. It’s interesting to see how the ABN Amro deal has been doing for the different banks involved. The mergers are set to continue, in the meantime delivery and revenue generation for the banks involved remains key.
January 30, 2008 at 11:12 pm · Filed under How IT works, blades, rackmounts
Got an email the other day about replacing the hard drive in a HP DL380. “What’s best practice?” I got asked. The process should be similar, the overall rule though is if in doubt contact your hardware support vendor/manufacturer before doing anything.
Basically the rule is that anything with purple tabs is hot swap, so you can swap the SCSI hard drives whilst the server is in use providing it has RAID setup. Let’s do the best practice steps:
- Check the server event logs for errors - it should state which drive has failed and which slot
- Check the HP insight agents - http://servername:2301 - log in and confirm this by selecting the array controller, the drive should go orange and say failed
- Check the front of the server, the drive should go orange
- Check you have a valid backup - and consider notifying users if the server is a high impact one - if it’s that high profile or you’re unsure do it out of hours
- Push the purple tab releasing the drive handle and then pull the handle to remove the hard drive
- Now, get the replacement drive (confirming it’s a compatible or identical drive)
- Plug the drive in, holding the handle and use the handle to guide in and secure the drive, it should close and click into the purple tab
The event log should show something like:
- Drive 0 removed
- Drive 0 detected
- Drive 0 status has changed to active
- Drive 0 status has changed to rebuilding (state 7 - I think)
- Drive 0 is now rebuilding
- Now the front of the drive should start rebuilding, the disk icon should flash. You can monitor the rebuild status using the HP Array controller or the HP insight agents.
Consider the following:
Replacing the drive should be a non-impacting event and 99 times out of 100 it is, but if the server has a fault with the array controller, it is generally unhealthy or unhappy, swapping that disk could cause further issues so do ensure that you have a valid backup. Ensuring the server and array controller firmware and drivers are up to date should avoid this.
The process above should work for any of the Compaq/HP Proliant servers with hot swap SCSI disks.
If you wish to change the drive offline - that is switching the server off. You need to simply shut the server down, wait a few seconds for the drives to stop spinning, remove the faulty drive, and power up the server, once the server has started read the F1/F10 prompts carefully selecting the wrong option can cause data loss. I normally get the server to boot into windows once the log in screen has appeared and the server has settled down and then replace the drive, but it’s up to you.
Always speak with HP before doing anything if in doubt and keep in mind some array controllers have minimum hard drive firmware revision levels for functionality or to ensure best performance.
January 30, 2008 at 10:56 pm · Filed under How IT works, virtualization, vmware
I met Chris for dinner this evening for a chat, I was asking him how things were going and he then told me what’s been happening. the following is an extract of the conversation to avoid any references to his identity. I asked him to step back and the following is the result of the conversation, as ever Chris remains ‘below the radar’, he works for a bank in Canary Wharf. I’ve put his replies in italic. Chris mentioned some issues regarding the change process which I thought were worth noting and talking about.
What’s the issue with retrospective changes. I ask.
We’ve been having a debate with the change guys. At the moment we use the change process like any other windows server team in any other bank. The debate has been surrounding a retrospective change.
A standard change is one where we announce for example we’re adding disk space to this cluster next Sunday, a retrospective change would be, I rebooted the server because it was failing, or we needed to resolve an application fault.
I see, (I reply). That’s fair enough, what’s the issue then?
There’s been some debate about whether the retrospective change should also cover restarting a service, clearing down log files, restarting the web services, SQL for example.
Let me give you an example, I restart IIS on a web server because the site is down, this technically is a change to production, but the work would traditionally be done under and incident, site is down, restart IIS, move on. The change team and the business lines are asking “Is that not a retrospective change?”. Should they not be notified?
It’s one of those things which is going to depend on your company change policy, coupled with your business teams requirements, that is the sensitivity of the system involved. Ultimately we need to define the parameters of the change process. Restarting the services on a server could be constituted as a change, by logging in you’re changing the server, you’re writing data to your profile, your registry keys. What we need to accept though, is that it’s not always going to be black and white. Should you not be operating on the basis that if you’re restarting a service/process/server to resolve an issue is only a change if you are making a change to the systems’ configuration or causing a further outage to the end user(s)?
I see, and what’s the VMWare issue? I ask
Well that’s an interesting one. We’re VMWare’d up, we’ve got VMotion to allow us to move virtual instances around the environment so that we can carry out necessary maintenance on an ESX server, or if one application needs to do some special testing, we can move their machines to a server with less virtual machines on it to avoid affecting other users. The issue is moving a virtual machine from ESX to ESX a change?
Also we’ve been adding new networks to some of the ESX servers to bring in new services, market data feeds etc, is this a change?
The answer I suppose is yes. But again it depends on the context. I’d argue that moving machines around the infrastructure is a change but not necessarily one that’s going to result in an outage to the end user. Crucially will it not depend on the chargeback model? If I own the infrastructure, you’re effectively renting a process and some storage from me with a requirement for a specific availability, the processor, the asset that it is powered by should be immaterial. Certainly as we take virtualization to the next level and we try an automate the virtual infrastructure, surely this kind of thing might be automatic how do you manage that in terms of the change process.
Stepping back a minute if I decide to shut down and replace the array controller in an ESX server during the day, and this means I have to move virtual machines to another ESX host, I suppose this would be a change as you’re carrying out scheduled work. Again it’s going to depend on your business, your change process.
Both issues are set to continue, in the meantime thanks to Chris for going over what he’s been talking about, and for dinner.
January 30, 2008 at 10:26 pm · Filed under HP BL30P blade, blades, rackmounts
I got a question by email:
Is there a way to ‘reset the ILO?’ I’ve had times when the ILO thinks someone’s logged in, or when it’s not quite behaving?
Great question, check you’ve got the latest firmware, this resolves several known issues. Anyway, the easiest way to reset the ILO, as in ‘reboot’ the card is to to the ILO settings tab, go to networks and press apply. The ILO will then set the network settings and reboot it. After about 40 seconds the ILO should be ready to use.
If this doesn’t work you can always try re-applying the firmware to the ILO.
January 30, 2008 at 10:20 pm · Filed under vmware
http://www.vmware.com/support/fusion/doc/releasenotes_fusion.html#new111
Build 72241 is a release build of VMware Fusion.
The release notes contain the following:
- Key Features of VMware Fusion
- Issues Resolved in VMware Fusion 1.1.1
- What’s New in VMware Fusion 1.1
- Gaming with VMware Fusion
- Download VMware Fusion and Virtual Machines
- Before You Begin
- Tips and Tricks
- Using Unity View
- Known Issues
Very cool, I’ll need to download the update, the new release includes some important fixes as well as some functionality enhancements, check it out! It’s a free update for existing users as I understand it.
January 30, 2008 at 9:57 pm · Filed under blades
http://h0bbel.p0ggel.org/ibm-bladecenter-s—installation
A couple of days ago I finally got a chance to play around with a IBM BladeCenter S chassis with a HL21 blade server. The BladeCenter S is positioned as an entry level blade solution for the SMB market and looked like the perfect solution for a small Lotus Domino based local consultant company that I was hired to perform the installation for. The usage scenario was a powerful, extensible and manageable solution that they could utilize in their development and testing work as well as allow for further growth. Initially it will be used to run VMware Server and run a few development VMs, but the plan is to migrate to a full VMware ESX based infrastructure as the company and their computing needs continue to grow.
Check out this great article talking about setting up a BladeCenter S chassis. I’ve yet to play with one yet, this article goes through setting it up with the issues experienced in doing so, a good read.
January 30, 2008 at 9:53 pm · Filed under Other things, virtualization, vmware
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/prnewswire/AQW08330012008-1.htm
PALO ALTO, Calif., Jan. 30 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — VMware, Inc. , the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the data center, today enhanced its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution with the new VMware Virtual Desktop Manager 2. Available immediately, VMware Desktop Manager 2 allows users to securely connect to their virtual desktops in the data center and gives IT administrators an easy and cost- effective way to manage virtual desktops. Major industry leaders, including Dell, HP, IBM, NEC and Wyse Technology, have embraced and extended VMware’s virtual desktop solution, making it a complete desktop virtualization solution for the enterprise.
VMware VDI integrates VMware Infrastructure 3 and VMware Virtual Desktop Manager 2 and provides an easy-to-manage desktop virtualization solution that takes advantage of virtualization technology used by more than 100,000 organizations. VMware VDI streamlines desktop management, reduces operational costs and provides business continuity capabilities that until now were available only for mission-critical server applications. By leveraging the capabilities of VMware Infrastructure 3, no other desktop virtualization solution offers comparable enterprise-class performance, reliability, security, manageability and seamless integration in a single solution.
VMware Virtual Desktop Manager 2 is a desktop management server that connects users to virtual desktops in the data center. With VMware Virtual Desktop Manager 2, end users can securely access their virtual desktops using either a personal computer or thin client. The product’s easy-to-use interface lets administrators manage thousands of desktops at once, and reduces the time it takes to provision a new desktop from hours to minutes.
Being able to manage and get the benefits of the virtual desktop is one of the key benefits of the technology, anything VMWare can do to help with the management, reporting and functionality of the virtual desktop has to be a good thing. Virtualization of the desktop is one of the next big things, being able to abstract the user from the desktop infrastructure, centralize it’s management support and switch to thin clients which are more energy efficient could bring real benefits to your costs and to the deployment process. New pc, deploy the thin client, set up user account and press go.
January 30, 2008 at 9:27 pm · Filed under Societe General
http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSKIM04591120080130
PARIS (Reuters) - Societe Generale fought off political pressure to sack its chairman on Wednesday after suffering the world’s worst financial trading scandal, but the French bank failed to quash persistent takeover speculation.
The bank’s board also said it had set up a special committee of independent directors to ensure that the cause and size of its rogue trading losses were fully accounted for.
The panel will be led by a Jean-Martin Folz, former head of French carmaker PSA Peugeot Citroen.
Very cool, business at Societe Generale continues with its chairman in charge. It will be interesting to see what the panel discover as a result of the investigation of the losses discovered, we’ll have to see what news develops, check it out, an interesting read.
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