Bladewatch.com

http://www.albawaba.com/business/pr/red-hat-enterprise-virtualization-30-beta-now-available-389510

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the release of the Beta of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, the next-generation version of the company’s end-to-end virtualization solution. With the release of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 Beta, Red Hat previews new capabilities that build upon its industry-leading scalability and performance for both server virtualization and desktop virtualization use cases.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and its Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor technology have experienced strong momentum and support leading up to today’s 3.0 Beta release. Customers such as DreamWorks Animation and NTT Communications have announced that their cloud services and offerings are built using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. In addition, in collaboration with other industry leaders, Red Hat helped to establish the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) to promote KVM as an open alternative to proprietary virtualization solutions. The OVA has been well-received by the industry with significant growth in membership. Further, KVM has powered the majority of published SPECvirt 2010 benchmark results at www.spec.org, including the highest score and highest scale-up overall, clearly demonstrating its performance excellence.

It is great to see Red Hat investment and innovation of their virtualization offering for their Enterprise offering, I’m off to read up more about it.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/oracle-unveils-oracle-vm-30-2011-08-23?reflink=MW_news_stmp

Today at an event for customers, partners and industry experts, Oracle announced Oracle VM 3.0, the latest release of Oracle’s server virtualization and management solution.
–  Oracle VM 3.0 is suitable for all datacenter workloads and features new policy-based management capabilities, advanced storage management via the Oracle VM Storage Connect plug-in API; centralized network configuration management, improved ease-of-use and Open Virtualization Format (OVF) support.
–  With the centralization of storage management alongside of logical network configuration and management, Oracle VM 3.0 allows administrators to streamline and automate end-to-end virtual machine provisioning for a significant reduction in time and overhead, simplifying IT processes and helping to reduce costs.
–  Oracle VM 3.0 helps customers deploy enterprise software in a rapid, repeatable and error-free manner with immediate availability of over 90 Oracle VM Templates for Oracle applications, middleware and databases.
–  Oracle VM 3.0 is four times more scalable than the latest VMware offering, supporting up to 128 virtual CPUs per virtual machine, at a fraction of the cost. Oracle VM 3.0 demonstrated support for up to 160 physical CPUs and 2TB memory using Oracle’s Sun Fire X4800 M2 servers.
–  When compared to VMware vSphere5 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux guest VMs, Oracle VM 3.0 running Oracle Linux guest VMs is four times less expensive.
–  Oracle VM is free to download, has zero license cost, and affordable, enterprise-quality support is offered through a simple subscription model per server. Terms, conditions and restrictions apply.

There has been quite a bit of analysis about this on many levels, regardless of what others say, that Oracle continue to invest in their virtualization offering is good news, it helps continue drive innovation in the market place and provide alternatives for the end user community which has to be a good thing. I’m off to read up more about the enhancements, it looks promising from what I’ve read so far.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/vmworldr-2011-brings-your-cloud-to-las-vegas-with-the-leading-virtualization-and-cloud-infrastructure-industry-event-2011-08-15?reflink=MW_news_stmp

PALO ALTO, CA, Aug 15, 2011 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — VMware, Inc. VMW -9.33% , the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today unveiled the speaker lineup and sponsorship list for the leading virtualization and cloud infrastructure industry event of the year, VMworld(R) 2011.

Underscoring the conference theme, “Your Cloud, Own It,” VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas will feature more than 175 unique breakout sessions from VMware and its ecosystem of partners and customers that are driving innovation in the virtualization and cloud computing industry. More than 250 sponsors and exhibitors are supporting the conference including Global Diamond sponsors Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP and NetApp, and Platinum Sponsors AMD, Brocade, CA Technologies, Dell Storage, F5 Networks, IBM, Intel, LG Electronics, Symantec, Trend Micro, VCE and Wyse Technology.

It will be great to see what announcements there will be at the VMworld event, as well as to see and hear about the training sessions, seminars and networking events, there is certainly a lot of buzz this year. Check out this article to read up about the speakers attending the event!

So I’ve been writing the blog since 2006, during that time I’ve played with nearly all of the Compaq/HP Proliant servers from the olden days Compaq Proliant 4500s (Pentium 90) through to their latest and greatest BL460 G7 blades.  The one common theme which we learned quite quickly and which I have written about was the driver and firmware thing, my interest even resulted in our infamous server firmware spreadsheet (which we love) and our FindMyFirmware iPhone application.

If you’ve never owned a server, had a fault with a server or managed servers in volume this may not be something with which you are overly familiar, however in the server world drivers and firmware are key. When you log a call to either any of the big vendors or a service provider they will ask:

1. Have you upgraded the firmware?
2. Are the drivers up to date?
3. Please supply a diagnostic report.

My pain point as a server support guy, as someone who has written about driver and firmware over the years is not so much upgrading the drivers and firmware as much as it is version management. I know that I need to have the latest and greatest, but as an engineer and working for an enterprise you quickly come to realize that you end up aiming instead for N-1, so you’re not quite the latest and greatest but not out of date, so that when you have to log a call there are not a series of updates that need to be applied to the server before we can progress through to getting the parts we need or the assistance we need to fix our problem. With this in mind I actually developed with some of my colleagues the bladewatch bundle, this was quite simply, a folder which contained firmware which I had downloaded once a month, plus a copy of the HP Diagnostic utilities (online) and ISO, as well as copies of the PSP and firmware dvd (in case it was needed), a bundle that an engineer could carry around on a USB, and know when you’ve got the downtime or if you’re doing maintenance, run this against it so we know it’s all up to date.

Anyway back to the purpose of this post, HP appear to have made further innovations in this space which is brilliant news. Their service pack includes support for Windows, Linux and VMWare:

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/spp/index.html

HP Service Pack for ProLiant is an enhanced, re-packaging of ProLiant systems software and firmware and is based on the rich legacy of Windows and Linux ProLiant Support Packs (PSPs) and HP Smart Update Firmware DVD that were found in the Insight Foundation suite for ProLiant. It is comprehensive systems software and firmware release offered as a tested solution on all ProLiant and BladeSystem servers.

It provides a single image for combined firmware and systems software for a single step installation instead of a two step installation of HP Windows and Linux PSPs and the HP Smart Update Firmware DVD. It repackages firmware, drivers, utilities, agents, non-agents, and other utilities that are required to keep pace in today’s rapidly expanding technology infrastructure as well as improves process for releasing these products to HP customers. Additionally, VMware drivers and offline firmware will be supported.

They had already made in roads with the work that they had done on the blade firmware bundle:

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/blades/bladesystemupdate.html

• »Overview
• »The HP BladeSystem c-Class requires firmware and management tool upgrades
• »BladeSystem for ProLiant Release Set Compatibility Table
• »Release Set Downloads
• »HP BladeSystem Release Sets for Integrity
• »Additional information

NOTE: HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosures properly configured with redundant Onboard Administrator and Virtual Connect modules can be updated online without disruption to production workloads. Firmware and PSP updates to blade components may require individual blades to be rebooted, which can be scheduled during an appropriate maintenance window for each server blade workload.

It’s great to see ongoing investment and effort being made in the systems management, driver and firmware space, anything HP can do to help their customers and end users maintain their systems not only empowers customers to learn and take interest in running their products, but also reduces the complexity for the customer in terms of systems management and should hopefully reduces’ HP’s support costs and time to resolution which works for everyone both sides of the sales and support space.

Some example articles about drivers and firmware that I’ve written over the years:

• http://www.bladewatch.com/2011/01/20/upgrading-network-card-firmware-does-it-take-the-server-off-the-network/
• http://www.bladewatch.com/2011/03/25/how-to-use-the-hp-smart-update-firmware-dvd/
• http://www.bladewatch.com/2011/05/07/upgrading-firmware-on-hp-servers-a-guide/
• http://www.bladewatch.com/2011/06/21/the-server-or-blade-bundle/
• http://www.bladewatch.com/2010/08/27/ilo-is-in-a-flash-recovery-state/
• http://www.bladewatch.com/2011/01/21/ilo-power-commands-a-few-questions/
• http://www.bladewatch.com/2011/07/10/findmyfirmware_and_dell_poweredge
• http://www.bladewatch.com/documents/firmware
• http://www.bladewatch.com/findmyfirmware
• http://www.bladewatch.com/documents/ilo/

My the innovation from HP and their competitors continue, the more we break down the barriers, make the product support information more accessible and empower the user, the more we can further empower how users use their equipment and their confidence in using it, creating opportunity for vendor and end user alike.

http://www.bladewatch.com/findmyfirmware/

I have been getting great feedback from people that have downloaded the FindMyFirmware application, it’s very simple, it’s a bladewatch baseline listing the server firmware that is applicable to that model of server, plus a built in link to download the specifications of the server, as well as provide information on an estimated manufacture date or ‘age of the server’, so you can determine it’s upgrade potential or suitability for replacement etc.

In summary, you select a server model and it displays:

• Current firmware – this is according to Bladewatch baselines, we tend to update them every few months
• Manufacture date – this is averaged with the information possible we have to hand, so if a server was released 2007 – 2009, we say 2008.
• Specifications – a built in button which loads the vendor specifications or product briefing for that server.

I have received some requests from colleagues in the industry and users asking when we were planning to add on additional vendors, you would be surprised how time consuming it is to gather the information and make it accessible for our application. I will be working on this in the near future.

I have added the Dell R610 and R710 11 Generation servers, as well as their PowerEdge 1950 / 2950 and 6950s. Check out our description page for more information. I always encourage you to check the dell support (www.dell.com/support) site for more detailed information about your server.

You can download FindMyFirmware here.

I read this blog article about what to carry on a USB stick in order to be able to manage your blade or rack servers and it got me thinking about something I mentioned to both the guys at Dell and HP the last time I met them either at a conference or at one of their blog events. The concept was just a directory structure per model containing the drivers and firmware for a server with a pre-defined baseline, so version 1.0 might be May 2011, which contains everything up to that date, and version 1.1 being June 2011, allowing me to be one month or so behind to prevent any issues from recently released updates and get everything up to a pre-determined baseline, understanding that I might have a mixed new and legacy estate.

For the HP:

• HP Proliant Support Pack 8.60 for x86 and x64 (Windows 2003 x86 and x64)
• HP Proliant Support Pack 7.90 for Windows 2000
• HP firmware – I’ve simply downloaded the online firmware for the servers that I look after and named the firmware after the server name, so DL380 G5 for example
• HP SmartStart ISO so that we can boot the server into the SmartStart cd and run the diagnostics or systems configuration
• HP Firmware CD – again so that we can do the complete system firmware – that is the disk, array controller, integrated lights out, system and network

For the Dell:

• Dell firmware for the servers that I look after – backplane, SCSI/SAS controllers, system, network and DRAC or iDRAC
• Dell drivers for the servers that we look after – Windows 2003 x86 and x64 + Windows 2008
• Dell DSET utility in remote and thick mode so that we can run and submit diagnostics
• Dell OpenManage Administrator tool and agents pack

For the IBM

• IBM drivers for the servers that we look after – Windows 2003 x86 and x64 + Windows 2008
• IBM firmware for the servers we look after – backplane, SCSI/SAS, system, network and RSA
• IBM Update Express ISO and DVD – a new one was released about a week ago
• IBM Dynamic System Analysis – their diagnostic tool both the offline and online or portable edition
• IBM Director agents for hardware monitoring through their IBM Director tool

Other tools/utilities

• Windows 2003 Service Pack 2 – useful if you need to re-service pack a server
• Winternals pack – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee460919.aspx
• Drac/ILO/RSA configuration scripts and utilities

Going forward the tools as well as the vendor utilities will naturally migrate or start to include ESXi tools and utilities as well as those for Hyper-V as they become more mainstream in my working space.

If I miss anything or you have suggestions, do let me know.  I would publish the bundle on the bladewatch site as a free download but I found the associated legal issues involved complex and not wishing to upset anyone or cause emotional trauma, I’ve listed them instead. As ever, they are just a guide and are in no way instructional and if in doubt ask your service provider or vendor for further information and best practice.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/it-business/nations-health-in-good-hands/story-e6frganx-1226078137767

BEFORE the Nursing Board of Victoria (NBV) became the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) in July last year, its Melbourne data centre was nationally recognised for its sophistication.

AHPRA is now the organisation responsible for the registration and accreditation of 500,000 health professionals in Australia. It replaced all the previously independent state boards separated by professions.

As NBV chief information officer, Michael Hoffman undertook a major virtualisation and consolidation project to deliver greater reliability and uptime.

Check out this article talking about how this agency has used virtualization to improve reliability and adaptability of its platforms, it’s always great to read how businesses and end users are benefiting from the platform, in this case VMware vSphere 4.

http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-hitachi-060911.html

Hitachi to Deliver Cloud Solutions Based on VMware vSphere and the VMware vFabric Cloud Application Platform to Financial Institutions in Asia

TOKYO and PALO ALTO, Calif. — June 9, 2011 — Hitachi Ltd. and VMware today announced a strategic partnership enabling Hitachi to deliver new cloud services to financial institutions in Asia. The new solution, Private Cloud for Finance Institutes, is based on VMware vSphere® and the VMware vFabric™ cloud application platform and will help Hitachi deliver IT as a Service to customers.

Japanese financial institutions are moving away from tightly coupled IT architectures in favor of virtualized infrastructures containing loosely coupled applications that can access a flexible pool of IT resources. This new model of delivering IT is designed to help customers simplify infrastructure management and improve business agility in a secure and flexible manner.

It’s interesting to see Hitachi delivering cloud services to financial institutions based on VMware’s virtualization and cloud technology, this creates further opportunities for their customers to be able to consume their requirements for capacity be it on all the time or on demand infrastructure using industry standard platforms that can be easily managed and integrated with their existing infrastructure with more flexibility in mind. Anything we can do to help end user requirements for services, for capacity or business empowerment on demand has to be a good thing for the end user communities and vendors alike.

Got a phone call from a colleague who’s started at a medium sized business outside London, their Windows 2003 cluster was rather unresponsive, the resources were in a hung state trying to come online to their BCP node and everything was stuck ‘online pending’, “It’s stuffed, any ideas”

It was at this point I sent him my basic cluster steps, now what you do in your situation will depend on your business and levels of comfort.

• First steps check the event logs – system and application, look for any specific error messages.
• Check the cluster log – this is usually set and lives in c:\windows\cluster\cluster.log – it logs what’s going on from a cluster perspective
• If you use EMC SRDF/C.E or GeoSpan – Check c:\program files\emc\symapi and look at the logs or use the GeoSpan/EMC SRDF/C.E tool to see what is happening from a storage perspective
• Follow standard Bladewatch.com rules – if in doubt, call it out, to your service provider, your vendor or service partner

Basic steps to restore service

Shut down the inactive node – the one from which you are trying to fail over

Reboot node with hung resources.

Steps to restore service with further troubleshooting

Shut down the node which is not in use – if possible set the cluster disk driver and the cluster service to disabled before hand

Shutting down the inactive node and disabling the cluster disk and cluster service will unlock any locks and should force the services back online.

Now reboot the active node which is unresponsive – the services should come back online to this node

Steps to restore and troubleshoot issue- it’s broken but there is time to play

If you’re using EMC – RUN EMCRPTS – it gathers all the logs and as a support tool is stunning (on both nodes)

On node one set cluster disk driver and cluster service to disabled and reboot

Wait for it to come back online

On node two set the cluster disk driver and cluster service to disabled and reboot

Let the cluster nodes settle

On both nodes we should now at least see the disks we expect on both nodes, we have in effect set it back to default.  Now we need to restore service.  On node A, set cluster disk service to system, set cluster service to automatic (or manual for more control) and reboot

The node should reboot and with the cluster service start, take ownership of the nodes and resources. Once the services have come online

On node B set the cluster disk service to system and the cluster service to automatic (or manual for more control and reboot)

http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-hp-virtualsystem-060811.html and http://www.hp.com/go/discover

LAS VEGAS, Nev., June 8, 2011 — Today at HP DISCOVER 2011, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, announced a new collaboration with HP on turnkey solutions to simplify and accelerate virtualization for customers on the journey to cloud computing. Built on HP Converged Infrastructure, the new HP VirtualSystem solutions will be integrated, pre-tested IT infrastructure stacks delivered as appliances that will help improve business agility, lower costs and enable cloud computing for enterprise customers of all sizes.

The new appliances will include optimized, turnkey virtual infrastructure and end-user computing solutions that deliver a full compute stack consisting of server, storage, networking and services from HP and leading virtualization and cloud infrastructure and management software from VMware. Offered in three scalable deployment options that are “right-sized” for customers, HP VirtualSystem solutions with VMware technologies will enable significant savings in deployment time for customers, helping them focus on more strategic projects for their organizations.

So it’s the HP Discover event in Las Vegas, however due to a number of reasons I wasn’t able to attend it this time, however there is some great content covering everything from their SuperDome, through to their networking, blade and Converged Infrastructure solutions, with great coverage of the different features of the event here. Do check it out, it looks like a great event!

There was the announcement above talking about the HP/VMware collaboration to improve their offering of virtualization and cloud technologies, making the technologies more accessible and scalable which has to be a good thing for their customers, the market place and competition alike, I’m off to read up more.