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Upgrading the driver/firmware on all you system components is just as important as the server itself. 

I put this together referencing a selection of Emulex cards with their firmware/boot code and latest driver versions. 

Please check the Emulex site for important install/upgrade information and check with your storage infrastructure team to ensure that what’s being deployed is compatible with your SAN infrastructure. Upgrading the firmware on your card should not result in an outage, but do test on a development system first.

Emulex firmware and boot code

LP8000 – http://www.emulex.com/downloads/legacy-products/lp8000.html
Latest firmware – 3.93a0 – (Dragonfly chip below v2.00 use firmware 3.30a07)
Boot code – 2.00a1 (x86)

LP9000 – http://www.emulex.com/downloads/legacy-products/lp9000.html
Latest firmware – 3.93a0
Boot code – 1.71a0 (x86)

LP9002 – http://www.emulex.com/downloads/legacy-products/lp9002l.html
Latest firmware – 3.93a0
Boot code – 2.01a2 (x86)

LP10000 – http://www.emulex.com/downloads/emulex/cnas-and-hbas/firmware-and-boot-code/lp10000.html
Latest firmware – 1.92a1
Boot code – 2.02a2 (x86)

LP11000 – http://www.emulex.com/downloads/emulex/cnas-and-hbas/firmware-and-boot-code/lp11000.html
Latest firmware – 2.82a3
Boot code – 2.02a2 (x86)

LPE11000 – http://www.emulex.com/downloads/emulex/cnas-and-hbas/firmware-and-boot-code/lpe11000.html
Latest firmware – 2.82a3
Boot code – 2.02a2 (x86)

All Emulex firmware and boot code – http://www.emulex.com/downloads/emulex/cnas-and-hbas.html

Drivers:

SCSI Port MiniPort driver (Windows)
http://www.emulex.com/downloads/emulex/cnas-and-hbas/drivers/windows/scsiport-miniport-driver.html
HPAnyware utility 3.0a16
Lputilnt – 1.8a18

FC Port driver (Windows)
http://www.emulex.com/downloads/emulex/cnas-and-hbas/drivers/windows/fc-port-drivers.html
HBAnyware utility – 2.1a21
ELXcfg – 1.41a17

Storport Miniport Driver and HBAnyware Kit
http://www.emulex.com/downloads/emulex/cnas-and-hbas/drivers/windows/storport-miniport-driver.html
This is a bundle for Windows 2003/Windows2008 and appears to contain everything you need.
HBAnyware utility – 4.1a35
Driver version 2.20.006

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Chris told me this story, whilst I called him to see how Canary Wharf was these days:

“Hi Danny, can you give me an audit/inventory of the Windows server estate?” Asked the head of IT.

Chris had been asked to produce a report of all the Windows servers and he was telling me that their manager had insisted on doing a full audit of all the servers. A registry scan a list of applications installed, whether it had IIS, what version of Windows and IIS were installed, how many cpus and disk space it had. He then merged using Excel this list with the data center inventory so that we could have tape drives and disk shelves attached to the servers in the report.

(Example data below):
Server19 – DL360 – G19 – Production Build server – Windows 2000
Server19 – Disk shelf – G19 – disk shelf to production build server
Server20 – DL380 – G19 – Production Active Directory – Windows 2000

The manager was most frustrated when the head of IT said:

“Thank you, but I only wanted to know how many windows servers we had. It’s for the data center project we talked about”

The manager was not displeased with what he had been given, it was more that it was not in the format, the style that he needed. He now had to filter out the disk shelf bits. He simply needed a list of servers with their model type and location. The rest was imaterial to the meeting that he was about to attend.

A communication break down. An error, “computer says no situation”. But you see, there are inventories and there are asset style data intensive let’s debate to the end of time inventories. “Is that dvd drive for server19 or server22 – for billing it might matter, but for high level what if scenarios, it’s not so much an issue?”

What we needed to establish was what derivative of data is core to your report so that we can establish whether you need a data center physical audit, or just we’ve got 900 windows servers, of which 123 are DL360′s 174 are Dell 1950′s, we have 14 IBM X3550s and the rest are a Compaq/HP mix.

Chris’ head of IT needed to move some of the servers about, free up some space in preparation for them to move to their nice new data center. For that he needs to know:

• How many servers there are
• How many are windows/unix/linux/tru64/solaris etc
• What type of servers there are – HP/DEC/Dell/IBM/Sun
• What applications run on those servers.

The head of IT failed to articulate what he meant by I need an inventory of the windows server estate, and the manager failed to ask what level of detail he needed. What he meant in effect by inventory.

Keep in mind, if I decide that I will move 147 servers next Tuesday, I will do the following typically:

• Audit the server from an operating system point of view
• Check the networking and storage attached
• Confirm if there are any ‘weirdness’s’ like a tape drive, 3 storage shelves plugged in the back

So what is core to this task is:

• How many windows servers there are.
• What hardware platform they are running on
• Their location

The rest, we can provide more information as requested, because this is an overview, a summary if you like upon which to make decisions at the top level.  The “what if we virtualized all DL580 G2 servers, what space would we re-claim and what business lines/applications would be impacted” or “if we virtualized all the internal IT systems, what could we free up in the data center?”

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So we left our app guy, wanting to own his domain, what’s the CIO thinking about all this?

Arnold, what’s going on in your space?

• Organizational change
• Discussions about green IT
• Doing more with less
• Virtualization – why we need it, why some people can’t use it
• Legacy kit and why we need to upgrade it
• Helpdesk statistics – who’s doing well and who isn’t
• Corporate IT strategy, where we are, where we need to be
• Data center space
• Aligning IT with the business need
• Budgets due to trading conditions
• Comparisons with other organizations “But my friend at ****** doesn’t have these problems”

What are your challenges?

• Everything’s become production – I can’t take a development system down during the day, we’re now effectively a 24/7 operation but my budget, my ‘business’ if you like isn’t set up like that.  Our organization is still set up very much around the 9-5 with on call support – but that’s not what the business are demanding – they want a guy available for changes and support 24/7 almost on demand
• Budgets, budgets, budgets, who owns what, who’s paying for what, why we’re paying for that, why we use that product and not that one, why we’re so expensive, that I can get a desktop from pc world for £300 but IT charge me £900 a year – but we include the software, licenses, the security patching, the audit trail, the billing, the end user helpdesk, phone system, desk and chair, as well as departmental storage, unlimited helpdesk support all day every day.
• Ownership – everyone seems to want to own their IT, but when I say, ok there’s your DataSynapse grid, you own and support it – you patch it, service pack it and manage the OS, often we get “but that’s an IT thing”
• Data center space – everyone wants data center space and power, how we manage expectations
• Escalations – getting called about a system going down, managing the various teams and the issue until it’s resolved – the need for more effective fault handling and resolution – I want to reduce the number of times I get escalated too – we need to establish what is tier1 and what tier 2/3 applications are being escalated sometimes unnecessarily.
• Complexity of the infrastructure, as we compartmentalize roles and ownership, the reporting, the billing, the delivery and organizational structure has to change to meet this, requiring more people management and communication.  You’re still a server guy, just you now report to Mike.

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So we left Chris with his BAU hard hat on and a Starbucks coffee in one hand, a Compaq screw driver in the other.

So  what does Johnny our application support/delivery manager want? We’ll need to see..

What are your core requirements, what’s on your mind?

• Improving performance and availability of our applications. Now increasingly we’re getting questioned not only on price, but on the availability, the reliability of our applications when bidding for business.
• I want more ownership of my systems and involvement so that I can see that they’re being tuned, managed and delivered in line with my business needs.
• I want greater transparency in costs, to be able to decide what is needed and what we can remove. 
• I want to be moving to next generation systems where everything is more stable, scalable and reliable, where we can deliver a next generation application, where my team can do the code releases and roll them back without involving many teams.
• I want to be able to decide what infrastructure, what layered applications we use, to manage costs and delivery.
• I want to run my systems, but I don’t necessarily want the nuts and bolts, building servers, security patching, firmware doing stuff.

What are your barriers to delivery?

• IT reluctant to give up control
• IT can be too organizationally top heavy, too many layers of bureacracy to go through
• It can be difficult to get a state of the infrastructure – what servers I have, what their specifications are etc
• Issues relating to buying in services, or even making purchasing decisions can be made difficult – is there really a reason why I couldn’t for example buy a Cell/B.E based server other than “we don’t buy them type servers here”
• A centralized support portal so the support teams and layers communicate to minimize disruption and ensure everything stays online
• The number of teams we have to communicate just to upgrade something – again one of the reasons, I want us to run the infrastructure – it can’t be that hard
• Lack of parity between how the individual IT teams behave in relation to what a change is, who owns what, responsibilities and delivery – especially in simple things like chasing help desk calls.

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So we left Mike wanting to upgrade all the servers from Windows 2000 to Windows 2008 in order to keep everything up to date, to reduce support costs and stay in vendor support.

Chris what we up and what are your priorities?

• Reduce call outs for on call
• Implement defragmentation on some key systems
• Upgrade firmware and drivers to keep everything up to date
• Get rid of anything older than HP Proliant G3 servers.
• Get rid of the problem servers
• Make security patching easier, quicker
• Fix the citrix servers – they’ve been high maintenance recently
• Ensure our inventory is up to date
• Share information about the server estate/the applications so I know what to do at 3am when something  goes on holiday and takes down the back office systems?
• Tune the monitoring so we’re monitoring what we should be to reduce on call or maybe include the nice to have stuff like fragmentation /hardware monitoring tools etc
• Improve our relationship with the business – give me an easier life
• Make remote working easier so that I don’t necessarily need to be tied to a company laptop to reboot a server on Saturday at 1pm or have Ops do it
• Work on and implement new standards for support, configuration etc.
• Play with Windows 2008 and start deploying that so we don’t get too out of date
• Improve our help desk stats and maintain delivery so we can avoid debates
• Work more as a team, sharing workload and information – avoid the master of one system
• Reduce our weekend work? Whether we ever do this is another thing though
• Make information more accessible – 80 page support documents are nearly useless at 2am when they don’t answer simple questions – what is the order of service to restart the application?

Chris’ priorities are BAU, their from a support standpoint, he’s wanting to:

• Make is life easier
• Illustrate his delivery to the end users
• Improve communication to his clients
• Centralize the support fuinctions/data and make it easier
• Reduce or rebalance the workload
• Refresh and renew the infrastructure – but is this not in a way to reduce or make his life easier, the delivery more effective?
• Avoid the running to keep still way of working – the need to stabilize the core and move on from there

What key challenges do you face then?

• Architecture is designed by an architecture team which covers infrastructure world – little interface with the business architecture teams on what they’re working on – standards which aren’t therefore always compatible
• Standard that might be cross business and therefore not suitable for our environment
• Discussions on support levels/delivery and on call/working hours
• Complexity of the infrastructure through organizational change – to apply a driver pack to one server might require three business units to sign it off – do I have the time to bother?
• A focus on the big picture, but not looking at the component parts – you need to reduce outages, but why are we having these outages, and what operationally and from an investment standpoint needs done
• Having to know everything – VMware, network, storage, citrix, inhouse and external application – what does that mean for my skills?
• Time to establish a wiki page to store information, to share knowledge and communicate with our clients
• Time to note what issues we’re having and noting them for the team to transfer skill sets
• Time to write proper documentation for each of the systems we support

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So what are you working on?

I’ve recently being trying to get approval to decommission all Windows 2000 servers, and combine with it, that servers that are not running Windows 2000 be replaced. Windows 2000 is shortly coming out of support and I want us to start replacing them with Windows 2008.

What number of servers does this involve?

We’ve got a server estate of 1900, 900 in London, about 400 in Chicago and 300 in our offices in Switzerland and Hong Kong. From this, we’ve got about 570 servers running Windows 2000, all of which should be replaced and the hardware refreshed.

I’m actually trying to enforce that anything older than 18 months be replaced.

 Can I ask about the hardware element? Yes, in what respect?

Anything that’s running Windows 2000 is going to be pretty old and not worth the bother to rebuild.

Is this an internal IT or a customer driven project?  Has someone in the business said “let’s dump Windows 2000″ or is this an IT initiative?

Oh It’s and IT one, the business need to be made to understand that Windows 2000 comes out of support next year! So we need to dump it, move on and bring our infrastructure into the year 2009. Also at the same time, we need to refresh our hardware and bring it up to date, this should improve energy efficiency and performance, I was thinking we could virtualize everything we could.

Have you got an anticipated project cost?

So far it’s about 1800 man days plus hardware. That includes the project manager/server/network/os time. I though by bundling it in, we can do everything in one go.

It might be a bit of a challenge but it’s a sales pitch we just need to do for funding, and I suspect the support teams will be behind it, so they can ditch the legacy systems. I’m doing a presentation to the head of IT about it next week.

Do you know how much you will need for hardware?

Well I was thinking if we manage to virtualize 20%, that leaves us with 400 servers or so to upgrade, (on the basis that we should be able to re-use some servers or decommission some roles via consolidation).

Some thoughts on his comments which we discussed.

So in the example above. Mike is asking for:

1800 man days.

• Let us say that a man day costs £300. 
  • Half the cost of asking a service provider to provide me a Wintel/Storage/Networks guy for the business day (9-5)
• That’s £540,000 assuming everything is done on time.

400 servers.

• Let us say mid range 2u server, mid price £3500?
• That’s £1.4 million.
• These figures exclude – storage, network infrastructure (deploying ILOs? 10GB Ethernet/operating system licenses/application upgrades for those applications which aren’t validated to the new operating system).

Remember, I cannot simply say there’s Windows 2008, I have to allocate a test system, have the os configuration validated, the application loaded and tested. I then have to discuss and approve the server configuration, ratify it against internal standards.

Five years ago, a stand alone Proliant 1600 might have been ok, but do we need dual power supplies? Clustering? Does the application need 1GB Ethernet which it might not have right now? We’re asking for £2 million on the basis that everything goes to plan and that there are no exceptions.

Let’s take as Mike’s example MSPA000876, his server of which he was particularly unhappy about. A large file server with for volumes ranging in size from 400gb – 800gb, a DL380 G3 with 2GB RAM, with Emulex LP9000 cards, running Windows 2000.

His concerns:  (perfectly valid ones)

• It’s running unsupported (out of date) Emulex cards
• What cards have we internally validated against each hardware, what drivers are validated, what cards have been validated to our storage switch, and our SAN? What do the vendors support and how does that fit in with our standards?
• The server hardware is out of support – have we ever been in support? Do we care?
• It’s got an out of date version of PowerPath (storage software) and the Emulex card drivers.

My questions:

• Does it work? Does the current system meet end user requirements?
• Could we further enhance what we have?
• Are we currently supported, and would the new configuration be in support – what do we mean by out of support?
• Would upgrading the hardware and the operating provide a direct user benefit?
• Does this solution need a new server or could we move it to a filer or something similar?
• Are we re-architecting each platform to check that we are only deploying what needs to have a server – are we consolidating roles – who decides that?
• Have you seen your ‘man day’ requests and thought about the costs?
• Have you decided what elements are in scope or not?
• That DL380 with 5 array shelves attached – who pays to cover it to SAN?  The project, or the business sponsor who really should have done it anyway years ago?
• The servers ‘out of scope’ as they’ll be replaced/decommissioned – who manages that?
• When servers are replaced and the old ones to be decommissioned – how do we ensure that they do go out the door and they aren’t rebuilt?

Could we not go on the basis of:

Windows 2008 is the new organizational Windows platform for production and development.

• All systems should be upgraded to Windows 2008 with those currently Windows 2000 being a priority.
• Issue below specification guidelines based on minium features for example let’s say all servers need to have lights out and shall we go on anything older than a G3.
  • Technically speaking, the G3 is fine, but on the basis that it is over five years old, we’ve had our value for money from it. Ideally we’d be G5 but, let’s look at what is possible.

First of all before we make any recommendations, we need to know:

• How many Windows 2000 installations we have – Mike has said 570 From those 570 servers:
  • How many can be virtualized?
  • How many are production/development How many are on ‘unsupported hardware’
  • How many are IT based (we own) How many are customer based
  • How many are customer facing and ‘technically have no outage’ (require swing servers).
  • How many will involve a SQL/IIS upgrade and therefore application validation?
  • How many will need a re-design – sorry it needs to be a cluster or have replication?
  • How many need an indirect capacity upgrade and who funds that?
• How do we prevent the free for all approach?

My Pentium 200 needs replaced, I’ll have the absolute MOST EXPENSIVE SERVER IN THE UNIVERSE BECAUSE IT ARE PAYING AND NOT ME, IT’S A FREE LUNCH, I NEED 19 PROCESSORS 128GB RAM AND 7TB OF STORAGE. Only to discover it’s an FTP server which sends three files a month and could be virtualized – but that need analysis, debate and approval/acceptance.

Once we’ve got that down, we can then make a presentation based on value for money, what is achievable, what is core, what we can do based on need and availability.

Mike’s not wrong. Of course he’s not. However, what we need is business buy in and we need data. Data that is filtered in such a way not to hide information or create walls, but to say this:

• Club class would be to replace everything – 570 servers, SAN boot it all, using virtualization where possible.
• Premium class would be to replace all servers with Windows 2008 and using SAN where possible.
• Economy class would be to rebuild everything Windows 2008, upgrading systems where appropriate, accepting minimum production standards and buying new servers only where necessary.

Key to this is figures and estimates of cost. I remember one CIO saying to me, “this guy came into my office and said to upgrade my SAN would cost 300 man days, is he nuts? How does he think I’m going to get that signed off?

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I thought it would be interesting to have a series the ‘phased approach to IT’.

You see, everyone has a different set of priorities. They all indirectly converge, but they are all equally different. It’s part of a series of posts that will follow over the next few days. 

1. The first is with ‘Mike’ who’s an architect at an enterprise somewhere in Canary Wharf. He’s wanting to upgrade all the Windows 2000 servers to Windows 2008.
2. The second is Chris – who’s got a wide ranging set of priorities down in sunny Canary Wharf in his organization that as ever remains nameless.
3. The third is Johnny, our application support manager, his priorities are “make it faster, make it more reliable but do it cheaply, I’m not made of money”.
4. The last is with Arnold, a CIO who works in an enterprise in the city which you wont have heard off.

The idea is to illustrate some of the commonalitites, some of the concepts that I decide on which have unexpected consequences, as well as what issues there are in getting work done, in doing the support, the strategy or the architecture.

Before I introduce Mike in the next post, here are some of the basics that we assume people often just know, just understand about billing, about the way IT works in a large enterprise.  Of course it’s different everywhere but the same if you see what I mean. Some enteprises are technology rich, investment rich, others are technology rich at the lowest cost and others hover in between. Let us begin…

• BAU (or Support) = is business as usual support. This is the team that is dedicated to keeping the lights on, your server serving, your application online, your desktop working, doing whatever it takes to maintain the existing IT infrastructure. There will be some BAU projects, like upgrade firmware, move data centers, because they are changes to the existing infrastructure as the business or IT situations mandate.
• Projects = these are specific requests for services/hardware/time to deploy an application, a new web site, re-install windows on a new server etc.  This is billed directly to the business unit involved.

So if sales decide they want a new DL380 G6, sales get billed:

• The cost of the server
• The internal ‘per man day’ cost to rack, configure and deploy the server including any storage/os/network and project management time.
• The software license and monitoring costs

If however as Mike’s post illustrates, we’re talking replacing all Windows 2000 servers, we need multiple business line sign off, a shared project ‘bucket’ with specific costs assigned to ‘man days’ (allocating me from fixing/configuring to installing Windows, and hardware/software).

Every server will need Windows, it will need the monitoring, database or layered software purchased – and remember when upgrading an operating system, often you have to upgrade all the layered bits like the database etc.

This kind of project is more difficult to obtain sign off:

• It requires more business buy-in – it works, why are you bothering me?
• It represents significant capital and man day investment
  • Do you want Windows 2008 upgraded on all systems or deploy that new web application or infrastructure for a new business line/business opportunity.
• It represents significant activities in the data centers – moves/changes, racks/unracks/decommissions all of which makes emotional people further emotional
• It involves swing kit for those systems which need to be on all the time.

It involves possibly upsetting development teams and a re-alignment of standards/best practice – saying sorry:

• A) Your application needs re-coded to a Windows 2008 compatible development platform.
• B) The new operating system standards are now: service accounts only, shares locked down, no administrative rights, no console access etc.

It’s therefore one of those world ending requests. Not impossible, but as with anything easier in stages, in little bites than as one single transaction.

Declaring that you wish to replace 400 servers isn’t going to be popular, particularly if the cost of that server is being billed directly to the owner:

• What’s wrong with my DL380 G2, it works doesn’t it? 
• Can we try installing Windows 2008 on my DL360 and if it works, we’ll use that, will the 2x18GB drives (in a RAID 1+0 set) be enough for Windows and my SQL database?
• I don’t want Windows 2008, I’ll have to re-certify/validate my application
• Will we suddenly find all these ‘servers appearing from the woodwork which previously ‘weren’t in scope’, what was acceptable just 18 months ago, might not be now – how many fibre cards do you now need?
• How many applications need made high availability or need data replication or disaster recovery?

There are so many elements that you need to think about in just changing hardware or operating system.

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This post continues regarding Chris’ support issues. I’ve removed anything vendor/customer specific. Chris is very frustrated for a number of reasons. The support contract is vendor specific and it’s negotiated through a service provider who have no influence over the vendor (just like Chris, he’s one of the many thousands of **** server owners). (Saving the organization money) Secondly, the support process he felt was unhelpful.

It’s a difficult needle to thread support, you have to protect yourself from ‘end user problems’, whilst managing genuine issues and resolving their calls. Being helpful and saying sorry, not our issue ever so politely.

The vendor support team have set processes to follow, they must not identify one organization from another (and often can’t), Chris is one of their many thousands of customers through which his company purchases servers.

From a branding standpoint however, the following disruption has resulted in:

Chris now quotes this vendor and it’s associated products as:

A) Pants.

B) Providing rubbish support.

Chris now suggest any other vendor other than this one for new products.

The project manager is ‘unimpressed’ that they had a support engineer on site for one business day swapping components out and there was an additional man day cost to be absorbed into the project costs. Also why didn’t IT have spare parts in stock? Didn’t they have a relationship with the vendor to bypass all this stuff?

In effect, for the sake of £3000 (the billable price of components and engineer’s time) or so, (give or take), the vendor has de-branded itself to a position of negativity, which requires additional effort and incentives when it comes around to purchase agreements.

It’s an issue which is multifacited and all the vendors have different support services, have different ways of dealing with customers. Key is managing your relationship, managing expectations and working with the customer to highlight what is achievable.

Getting a DOA product is not a world changing event, it’s an inconvenient, a disappointment you might say, but it’s part of life and we all have to move on.

Chris has been successfully rebooted at a cost of £2.65 (Starbucks coffee) and reminded that it’s part of support, of delivery, and that life really is too short. So next time, follow process, escalate where necessary, but maintain the civility, maintain the relationships and accept that failure is not anyones fault per say, we need to address issues, comment on ways of improving delivery and communication, accentuate the positive, never the negative.

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This post continues regarding Chris’ support issues. I’ve removed anything vendor/customer specific.

From Chris.Surname@largeenterprise.com
To:vendor.support@largeservervendor.com
Subject: Server wont power on.
Hi

Can I please log a call, my ********-***** wont power on. It’s just been delivered. We have tried reseating the components but it still does not work.  Can we have an engineer visit and take a look?

Regards

Chris Surname
Production Support
IT Services
Large Enterprise
LargeEnterprise.com

Please think about the environment before printing this email.
“Working towards a carbon neutral business”
LargeEnterprise.com, a LargeEnteprise.com subsidiary company.

This email does not constitute as a contract and if received in error, please delete and contact the original sender or emailsupport@largeenterprise.com.

Hi Chris,

Subjet: Call ID – 00018576933

Thank you for contacting largeservervendor.com with your request today. I am responding to your call.

Can you please run the system diagnostics and provide the following information
Serial number:
Asset number:
Hostname:
System firmware:
Array controller firmware:
Additional Component firmware:
Specifications:
Operating system:
Error:

Kind regards

Arthur
***** Server Specialist
Technical Delivery Services and Support
LargeServervendor.com

Hi Arthur,

Subject: Call ID – 00018576933

I have provided the details below. Apologies, but I cannot run the diagnostics, we have been unable to get the server to power on, the details are below:

Serial number: ****9****H***
Asset number: SRV00109821
Hostname: SW0001923
System firmware: System will not power on, cannot provide this information.
Array controller firmware: System will not power on, cannot provide this information.
Additional Component firmware: System will not power on, cannot provide this information.
Specifications: 2×2.93GHz Xeon 5500 processors/16GB RAM/4x146GB 2.5 inch SAS drives, integrated array controller
Operating system: System will not power on, seek to install Windows 2008
Error: Server wont power on

Regards

Chris

Hi Chris,

Subject: Call ID – 00018576933

Unfortunately, I am unable to supply an engineer until we have the following information:
Diagnostic logs and results
Windows System event logs, hot fixes installed and service pack information.

You can download our diagnostic tools which can run from cd/usb at ftp://largeservendor.com/support/diagnostics/server****/v4.87a/x487a.zip

If you require assistance download or running the diagnostics, please let me know and we can run through that, or send you the diagnostics guide on pdf.

Regards

Arthur.

Hi Arthur,

Subject: Call ID – 00018576933

The server does not power on.

I cannot run the diagnostics as no lights come on when we try to power on the server nothing happens, the power feeds indicate that power is not coming into the server.  I have had facilities verify the power feed and had the internal hardware team check it, without success.  Can we escalate this call and request an engineer be brought on site?

Regards

Chris

Hi Chris,

Can you tell me where we are with the server please? Has Windows been installed, I need it for next week?

Regards

Janet

Hi Janet,

The server wont power on, I’ve had hardware look at it but they were unable to fix it, I’ve escalated to the vendor.  At the moment they wont look at the server until I send them the diagnostics/event logs, but it doesn’t power on so we can’t provide either.

Can you escalate/assist?

Regards

Chris

Hi Chris,

Subject: Call ID – 00018576933

Have you had any luck getting the logs/diagnostic information so that we can progress this call?

Regards

Arthur.

Hi Arthur,

Subject: Call ID – 00018576933

As discussed previously, we cannot power the server on.  I have escalated this to our account manager for assistance.

regards

Chris

Hi Mike,

We’ve got a problem with one of the servers we ordered, it came earlier this week, the guys can’t get it to power on, can you arrange to swap it out? I’d rather not go through the support process since it’s only a week old and appears DOA.

Regards

Janet,

Hi Janet,

Apologies, we don’t swap out servers, I’ll have an engineer attend and investigate.

Regards

Mike

Hi Mike,

I can’t afford to have further delays to the project and am concerned at the lead times of an engineer turning up.

Regards

Janet

Janet,

An engineer is arriving tomorrow to investigate.

Regards

Mike

Hi Chris,

We would like to inform you that an engineer has been sent to investigate the issues relating to your call.  This is as a result of further investigation of the issues involved and a request from your account manager.

Regards

Arthur

Hi Chris,

Any update from the engineer?

Janet

Hi Janet,

He’s looking at it, so far he’s replaced the following components:
System board
Back plane
processors and power convertors

He’s now running the diagnostics, they recommend that we upgrade the firmware and run the diagnostics.  I’ve had the firmware upgraded, and he wants us to run the diagnostics and then submit if they come up with an error. Else he says it’s fine.

Regards

Chris.

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I got a call from a rather emotional Chris (he’s still enjoying the view in his very nice office down in Canary Wharf at an organization that shall remain nameless).  Anyway, they bought a new server (1 of 11 actually). A nice new impressive 2u ultra fast, ultra efficient (using the new Intel processor) server with 16GB of RAM, enough local storage for their new web application.

There was however an issue.  The server got unboxed, it got configured to the organization specifications (a dvd drive fitted), an asset tag added, a nice sticky label to identify asset SRV00109821 as SW0001923. To avoid arguments and debate, I’ve removed any reference to the vendor and the hardware involved, I suspect we’re all guilty of following process, let’s move on to the story.

The hardware guy successfully racked the server, he plugged in the power cables and no green lights came on (the ones to suggest there was power, that the server was operational). So he did the first line things, he removed and re-seated the power supplies, he checked the power cables were ok, he unplugged the power for five minutes, he looked at the front and decided that the server was broken. It was unracked taken back to their lab, where he was unable to get the server to switch on at all.

Chris emailed me to illustrate his pain within the organization and when dealing with the vendor. It follows in the next post, and illustrates wonderfully not only service delivery but also vendor/customer relationships.

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