Bladewatch.com

So we’ve been doing work at Bladewatch on our iPhone application to make information more accessible when you are out and about. One of the things we asked colleagues, people we interviewed or spoke with and our readers was about what information they were after, what information they might like made more accessible, and the result of this is our first application. FindMyFirmware – the demo currently features information we’ve compiled together for testing on HP servers.

We’ve decided to post a video of it online using YouTube so we can get some feedback whilst we get back to apple with some more information and registration details. We’re inviting everyone to get involved, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Oracle and Viglen to name a few.  The concept is simple and is all developed with openness in mind, we’re not seeking to detract from anyone’s support site, nor invade copyright, we’re simply loading content into an easy to read format.

In summary, at the moment with the application, you can look up a server, get the quick specs information, the averaged manufactured date (we’ve averaged this out for each server), and see the current supported version of firmware that we have tested. The same applies for their RIB/ILO/ILO2 and ILO3 cards, the current demo includes the majority of their blade and rack servers, including legacy Proliant products for which data gets more complicated.

If you have any suggestions or comments, do get in touch – martinmacleod@mac.com

Regards

Martin MacLeod

I’ve found this issue when trying to upgrade servers to Windows 2003 SP2, if the Emulex drivers are below a specific version, service pack 2 displays an error and will not install, there is a known work around which I found on the Emulex site:

Problem
During installation of SP2, the following error is displayed and installation does not continue:

Setup has detected a driver (elxsli2.sys) that is not compatible with Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2. Please contact Emulex to get an updated driver and then restart the installation.

Cause
The FC Port driver v2.22a8 and earlier is installed on the server although it may not be in use. The FC Port driver v2.22a8 and earlier is not compatible with SP1 and SP2.

Resolution
Use the following procedure to remove the FC Port driver. It is recommended that you update to the Storport Miniport driver. Verify with your storage vendor for support and compatibility.

If the driver installed on the HBA in Device Manager is the FC Port driver, remove HBAnyware through the Add/Remove Programs control panel.
Use the Add/Remove Programs control panel to remove any FC Port driver that is installed. Do not reboot yet.
Delete these files in the %windir%\system32\drivers directory if they exist:

elxsli2.sys
elxnet.sys

Delete the following file in the %windir%\system32 directory if it exists.

elxcfg.exe

This step is optional and removes old, unused keys for the Emulex FC Port driver.
WARNING Using a registry editor incorrectly can cause your system to fail to boot forcing a reinstall the operating system. Use registry editors at your own risk.

Delete the following keys using regedit.exe or regedt32.exe if not updating to a newer FC Port driver or migrating using the FC Port Migration tool.

HKEY_Local_Machine -> System -> CurrentControlSet -> Services -> elxsli2

Install a newer driver that is compatible with SP2 (Storport Miniport preferred)
Reboot the server if requested
Install Service Pack 2

Applies To
Emulex FC Port driver 2.22a8 or earlier
Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition
Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition
Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition
Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Web Edition

Remember if you are upgrading your Emulex software/drivers and firmware, or service packs, be sure to check any other layered software like PowerPath/Solutions Enabler or SRDF/C.E or Symantec Veritas Storage Foundation as there may be dependencies.

http://www.platform.com/press-releases/2010/platform-computing-debuts-platform-lsf-8

NEW ORLEANS, SUPERCOMPUTING ‘10, November 15, 2010 – Platform Computing , the leader in cluster, grid and cloud management software, today announced the availability of the latest version of its flagship product family, Platform LSF, the industry’s most comprehensive workload scheduling solution for high performance computing (HPC).  Designed to handle complex, distributed HPC environments, Platform LSF maximizes existing IT infrastructures by allowing more work to be done with fewer computing resources in the fastest time possible.  Version 8 boasts a number of new features including the ability to delegate administrative rights to line of business managers; live, dynamic cluster reconfiguration; guaranteed resources to ensure service level agreements (SLAs) are met; flexible fairshare scheduling policies; and unparalleled scalability to support the large clusters in use today.

It’s great to see the innovations and improvements in Version 8, the ability to delegate administrative or management rights to the end user community, to the business or application manager is not only a welcome functional improvement, it can actually help with the on-boarding and integration process. That as a grid manager I can grant the relevant rights, give elements of control, of management and monitoring to the end user is an exciting concept, and helps further the message of grid being an open platform for delivery, for business empowerment. Anything that can be done to aid in low latency configurations, in achieving or exceeding service level agreements has to be a good thing, to provide grid/hpc as a platform for delivering application compute resources and end user functionality, very cool, I’m off to read up more.

It’s always good to see customer feedback and insight in relation to platforms, whether it’s what they are using the platform for, why they have chose that platform, it’s always great to see and understand. The article below talks about Previder is using Cisco UCS in it’s data centers, it’s an interesting read, including business benefits etc, do check it out.

http://finchannel.com/Main_News/Tech/74671_Previder_Uses_Cisco_UCS_System_to_Exploit_New_Areas_of_Hosted_IT_Service_Provision/

The FINANCIAL — Cisco on November 3 announced that Previder (formerly Introweb BV), a provider of virtual services to the IT specialist, software vendor and Internet service provider (ISP) sectors, has deployed the Cisco Unified Computing SystemTM in its data centers.

http://www.vkernel.com/details/items/vkernel-and-microsoft-collaborate-on-chargeback-for-private-cloud-initiative?SRC=BL

Berlin, GERMANY November 9, 2010 — VKernel, an award-winning provider of capacity management products for virtualized data centers, today announced general availability of VKernel Chargeback 2.5 with Hyper-V.  The latest version of VKernel’s chargeback product was developed in collaboration with Microsoft to support private cloud computing environments based on Microsoft infrastructure.  Chargeback 2.5 integrates with both Microsoft System Center Operations Manager and System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self Service Portal to help managers of private clouds easily charge for IT resources consumed or allocated at the departmental or divisional level.

Microsoft’s self-service portal is a fully supported, partner-extensible solution built on top of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. IT professionals use the self-service portal to pool, allocate, and manage resources to offer infrastructure as a service and to deliver the foundation for a private cloud platform inside data centers.

Anything we can do around the charge back space has to be a good thing, the more we discuss charge back models, the possibilities and best practice the more we can develop strategies that can help meet the ability to deliver, fund and manage a platform. So many projects have found challenges not with the technology as much as what I refer to as the branding and the organizational factors. A unified voice with regards to standards, ownership and best practice, combined with internal onboarding, ‘the sales pitch’ and maintaining or organizing the next generation platform, combined with issues like charge back and support can be the difference between success and marginal implementation. As with grid, it’s not the ability to technically support consolidation of application and infrastructure, it’s the ability to accommodate the various business drivers and requirements, whilst providing a unified platform, meeting the what if type questions, having answers and processes to prevent issues with performance and reliability, some of which can be mediated or hindered through concepts like cross charging. What is the cost per virtual machine, the cost per cpu hour, or the cost of an extra TB of storage for my virtual machine, is that part and parcel of the virtual machine or do I pay for cpu, for network, storage and memory above the ‘default configuration’.

Re:  Business Documentation

Dear Mr Macleod,

We are currently in the process of reviewing your iOS Developer Program enrollment information and have received the documents you have sent in to us.

……

Apple Developer Support

We have some exciting news over at the bladewatch editorial team, there are a number of things going on. Firstly we’re putting together a series on production support which is set to begin early next year. But most importantly, is the email above from the Apple Developer Support team.

It’s the Bladewatch iPhone application.

We’re going to publish a video of it, we’re extremely proud of it, and we’ll explain exactly what it aims to achieve. We’re not trying to tread on any toes, or re-publish content, we are simply aiming to create a series of applications which make it easier to access the information you need when you need it – a google for the blade or server world, for the engineer and the IT manager.

The applications under development are:

1. Systems management
2. Systems management operations
3. Virtualization best tips and concepts
4. Grid best tips and concepts

We’ve got a video of the application in use and will publish it shortly. For any of you non-iPhone handset users, we hope to translate it to other platforms shortly. Once we’ve launched it we hope you will provide us with feedback of anything else we need to include and any vendors that we are missing. We’re going to get in touch with them shortly.

There’s a lot of excitement, a buzz if you like, say cloud or virtualization to an IT manager, a CIO or an engineer and you will all get a different viewpoint, from the “cloud is outsourcing in another hat”, to the “next generation IT where the server is no more”. Interesting, I think it’s more a concept that I’ve written about before which is Running IT as a business, that is IT version 2.0 (without sounding dramatical). It’s taking the concept of service provisioning, that is for once establishing the business requirements and matching those with the IT, deciding what components are key to my business, what components or services we can buy in, and what we would rather have operating in a mixture. A move away from the box buying days, where IT would order you a server, a copy of Windows and then install it and charge you back over so many years.

You see the challenge in this space, in the olden world is not technical, nor is it particularly financial (we can move the costs around), it is based on delivery, adaptive business needs and that age old question of “but I could get it from (insert company name) in 10 days, why does it take you guys so long”? The prime example being the developer I spoke with over dinner a few weeks ago in Canary Wharf working for a multi-national:

“I logged a call for several TB of disk space for our SharePoint platform, that’s the database, the backups, the logs and dumps, everything we needed to host it for the next few years growth.”

“The response was that there was insufficient storage on the SAN/NAS, that they could present local storage but that would take 15 days to order, sign off and configure.”

“Is the storage coming from Neptune, do you want my Amex?” asked the developer

It’s an easy concept to get stuck on. Let me work back for two seconds before we go back to IT version 2.0. In the old days world there are standards and procedures, for operational and technical reasons, we need to use the organizational purchasing model, with approved suppliers, using existing processes to protect the organization and it’s shareholders from unnecessary risk and costs. Therefore, to order your disks requires a quotation, which requires a purchase order, and a note of intention, and approval, and sign-off, and purchase and delivery and installation and configuration.

So back to IT version 2.0 what does that mean? IT teams re-organizing around a model of service management, application management and reporting. One in which the business say we need (insert requirement) with IT choosing the best range of technologies to achieve this. So for common applications which work across all business lines like email, like storage, it might mean an internal cloud, an internal set of systems configured to provide a high available infrastructure which might be supported on a follow the sun model using follow the sun infrastructure. Rather than have London email, New York Email, we have regional hubs, EMEA email, Americas email and Apac email, which could theoretically move around the globe wherever the power is cheapest or the capacity exists. It can also though mean right sizing (this is a polite way of saying cutting) the services around the user base, the business or application, so rather than issue, deploy and support 4000 desktops with Windows, with Office and every conceivable standard product, we have a combination of thin client, applications down the wire and business specific environments, classes of users which determines things like application, like resilience and performance – the facilities guy might use the light client which has Windows and Internet explorer, with all the applications online or streamed as the requirement arose.

What does this mean though?

• Further transparency of end user requirements and acceptance of cost – at the same time of understanding business criticality from both IT and business users
• Running IT as a business – knowing when to invest at the right time, when to change the nature of your charge-back and billing models to change user behavior, and reduce operational costs – that Gerald has an application written for Windows 2000 is admirable from a development cost saving standpoint, but could be resulting in a hidden cost in Microsoft support contracts, specific hardware maintenance and management which isn’t.
• Changing to outside the box thinking – where we accept what it is we actually need to perform that specific tasks and meet the business needs – rather than the one size fits all approach  what Front Office need and Back Office are prepared to spend is different and should be treated as such.

The challenges:

• Are IT teams and the business ready for such change? How to make IT a hybrid of IT and business people, how to get the mix just right
• How does this change things in terms of operational and application complexity – does this make the IT more complex to manage and how we react to this
• What legislative and operational risks does change bring to the table, and how do we address those ownership issues – who’s the guy I phone at 4am to say there is a very unhappy trader called Percy looking to set fire to someones desk if they can’t get his deal settled in the next 45 mins
• How to manage local and business specific features – in the olden days world a local team might be able to know of the top of their head how to manage the application, what to press if service a failed etc, as we go global, go outsourced or cloud, how do we maintain this knowledge, and adapt it to meet global needs, global teams.

There are exciting times ahead, change can always be a challenge but it can also be the opportunity many have been looking to materialize. Embrace the change and see how it can work for your business, your IT and your end user community.

Interestingly, where would I place the big three blade vendors? That’s something that my brother has been trying to get me to answer for many a month since I started the blog back in the olden days (October 27th 2006).

I shall remain non committal having managed and supported all three, Dell, IBM and HP’s products. Keeping informed about different vendors in the server, blade and general infrastructure is what matters, also considering the option of having a mixture of platforms for different uses, for different parts of the business makes sense.

Anyway, here are some of my key concerns:

• Firmware/driver/management deployment and upgrades
• Ease of hardware component swap outs – what the vendor says is best practice and the reality are often different
• Accessibility of hardware components – it sounds silly but the interoperability of components, taking a controller or network card from one server and using it in another
• Ease of management through consistency – common tools and ways of managing the server – lights out, array configuration, network boot, simple things like F10/F12 or Ctrl-A, that the hot keys are all the same across the platform
• Desktop operating system, browser and client tool independent systems management – you’d be surprised the issues experienced with simple things like java run-time versions
• Compatibility with industry standard tools like Altiris, BladeLogic etc.

Some vendors are better than others, all have their areas of centers of excellence, and ultimately it remains a financial, operational or personal decision, everything else is noise, for that reason, my favorite vendor will for the time being remain nameless.  One thing though – the vendor, that can make evolve their blog, their support site more interactive, to implement a more flexible way of communicating with support both in terms of asking questions, and finding information gets my vote every time – your server hardware is secondary to my ability to support it without trauma. (Learning support rules, procedures or java run-time and firmware versions)

http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Eye-on-Blades-Blog-Trends-in/Polls-Closed-HP-wins-seat-as-blade-market-leader/ba-p/83045

No, not the US elections on November 2nd…I’m talking about the results of voting by 150 IT pros, who were asked by IT Brand Pulse what they thought about blade server vendors.  HP topped the rankings in five of the six categories of this November 2010 Brand Leader Survey.

An interesting post on the HP site quoting the results of a survey of the blade market, they seem to have done very well. It’s always interesting to see these kind of surveys if anything to see what people are talking about and how they are perceived. As with anything customer loyalty, customer satisfaction and innovation can be debated until the end of time, that each vendor meets or even exceeds the end user community’s expectations is what matters on the ground, everything else is noise.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms10-nov.mspx

Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification issued: November 4, 2010
Microsoft Security Bulletins to be issued: November 9, 2010

This is an advance notification of security bulletins that Microsoft is intending to release on November 9, 2010.

This bulletin advance notification will be replaced with the November bulletin summary on November 9, 2010. For more information about the bulletin advance notification service, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification.

To receive automatic notifications whenever Microsoft Security Bulletins are issued, subscribe to Microsoft Technical Security Notifications.

Microsoft will host a webcast to address customer questions on these bulletins on November 10, 2010, at 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada). Register now for the November Security Bulletin Webcast. After this date, this webcast is available on-demand. For more information, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Summaries and Webcasts.

Microsoft also provides information to help customers prioritize monthly security updates with any non-security, high-priority updates that are being released on the same day as the monthly security updates. Please see the section, Other Information.

This month’s patch updates seem to be a little lighter with patches mainly for the Office suite of products, check to see if your infrastructure or applications are in scope, and be sure to apply the patches to non customer facing systems to prevent any unexpected behaviour. As ever at bladewatch we go on about patching, because it’s the first question you get asked when logging a call, are all the patches up to date, as well as the bios and system firmware/driver packs?