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Microsoft and Press release

REDMOND, Wash. — Aug. 19, 2008 — New licensing, expanded product support policies and a worldwide series of events from Microsoft Corp. help business customers create more dynamic datacenters and enterprise IT systems with virtualization software. Beginning Sept. 1, 2008, customers will be able to move any of 41 Microsoft server applications between servers within a server farm as often as necessary without paying additional licensing fees, and they can take advantage of expanded specialized technical support.

“Businesses are taking steps to make their IT operations more dynamic and are delving into virtualization as a cornerstone strategy,” said Zane Adam, senior director of integrated virtualization in the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft. “Microsoft recognizes this and is innovating its licensing policies, product support and a wide range of IT solutions to help customers get virtual now.”

To highlight the recent innovations in virtualization, Microsoft also will begin a worldwide series of “Get Virtual Now” events this month that will showcase Microsoft virtualization products and partner solutions, reaching more than 250,000 IT professionals.

Very cool, Microsoft getting more involved in virtualization can only further enhance end users movement to a virtual environment and open up further opportunities, extra functionality and hopefully best practice. Any improvements in validation, in support of applications in a virtual configuration has to be a good thing for the virtual movement. Do check it out.

HP

HP, Intel Corporation and Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) today announced the creation of a global, multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education. The goal of the initiative is to promote open collaboration among industry, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing.

The HP, Intel and Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed will provide a globally distributed, Internet-scale testing environment designed to encourage research on the software, data center management and hardware issues associated with cloud computing at a larger scale than ever before. The initiative will also support research of cloud applications and services.

HP, Intel and Yahoo! have partnered with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany to form the research initiative. The partnership with Illinois also includes the National Science Foundation.

Very cool, I wonder if we might see more development in terms of products/services around the cloud computing space. It will be interesting to see how cloud computing as a business platform develops, as we abstract the application, the end user from the hardware and as we tier the data center, the infrastructure and the application - might we have different configurations, technologies to achieve the cloud?

The tier1 cloud, the one that delivers core services and functionality to the end user, might use high available redundant compute nodes, the development cloud which rents out application time, space, or power, might run on the cheapest compute nodes in a fresh air cooled data center with cheap storage. How we transform not only the technologies, the best practice not to mention the way we do business including the billing will be the interesting part - how much of my IT transactions do I need to control? How much of the IT function is core to my business, and how much can be outsourced to the ‘cloud’ to the common infrastructure - can my common applications run on an infrastructure I don’t own? We’ll have to see, do check out the article.

I am continually getting emails from server admins around the world asking me about resetting the ILO password for HP servers. I’ve decided to write a quite guide on how to do this — I hope you find it useful.

I used this link on HP’s support site to help.

Ready? Let’s begin!

Copy the following text to notepad and save as xml.  Now run the hponcfg utility, to load this configuration:

In summary it will reset the username and password to Administrator and the password to bladewatch, it won’t modify any network settings, but will rename the ILO - you can always rename the ILO afterwards, or just remove the bits you don’t want, just remove the text enclosure ip enable value to reg ddns server.

You’ll need a relatively new version of the firmware on the ILO - it will work on HP Proliant rack servers like DL380G4 - anything with the integrated lights out, firmware should be at least

<RIBCL version=”1.2″>

        <LOGIN          USER_LOGIN=”x”
                        PASSWORD = “x”>
 
 <USER_INFO MODE=”write”>
 
   <MOD_USER USER_LOGIN=”Administrator”>
       <PASSWORD value=”bladewatch”/>
    
 </MOD_USER>
 
 </USER_INFO> 

 <RIB_INFO       MODE = “w” >
 
 <MOD_GLOBAL_SETTINGS >

 <REMOTE_KEYBOARD_MODEL VALUE = “BRITISH”/>

 </MOD_GLOBAL_SETTINGS>
 <MOD_NETWORK_SETTINGS >
  
   <ENCLOSURE_IP_ENABLE VALUE=”No”/>
   <DNS_NAME VALUE = “Gerald”/>
   <REG_DDNS_SERVER VALUE=”N”/>

 </MOD_NETWORK_SETTINGS>
        
 
 </RIB_INFO> 

  
 </LOGIN>
</RIBCL>