VM /ETC

Archive for September, 2009

I’m not a fortune teller and I don’t have a crystal ball, but during my attendance at HP Storage Tech Day I definitely received an impression that the acquisition of Left Hand Networks now plays a key role in future storage offerings at HP. Based on the discussions, presentations, and hands-on-labs I participated in, Left Hand’s storage virtualization model is obviously common strategy among other HP storage products moving forward. I predict a win/win storage scenario is “in the cards” for both HP and it’s customers.

The Left Hand Model
Left Hand Networks established itself with SMB and Mid Market customers by combining storage controllers and disk shelves into one x86 based appliance that serves iSCSI storage to ESX hosts. Linking multiple storage appliances together in a cluster, Left Hand replicates iSCSI volumes across all nodes creating a highly available SAN for virtual hosts. If one node is no longer available the remaining ones seamlessly continue to provide shared storage via the replicated data. Add to this the capability to non disruptively add additional Left Hand appliances, which then enables companies to take advantage of a pay-as-you-grow SAN. Performance improvements and tuning can also be achieved as existing volumes are automatically spread across additional disks provided with each new Left Hand appliance joining the cluster.

The acquisition press release (linked above) provides further insight into HP’s business strategy incorporating Left Hand’s products in it’s portfolio.

“With the addition of LeftHand Networks, HP will add midrange offerings to its suite of iSCSI solutions. Customer needs at the low end of the market will be met with the HP StorageWorks All-in-One Storage System (AiO) and HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array (MSA) product lines. The high end will be addressed by the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) line. Customers will further benefit since LeftHand Networks’ solutions are already certified to work with a wide range of HP products, including HP ProLiant servers, HP BladeSystem infrastructure, HP ProCurve Networking and HP Insight Control management software.”

Today HP offers P4000 SAN Solutions with Left Hand technologies.

Server and Storage Convergence
HP’s message from the very beginning of Storage Tech Day was that they intended to converge their server and storage infrastructure offerings. This seems to me to be creating products that by design offer similar scale out capabilities as Read the rest of this entry »

Today I am in Colorado Springs, CO attending Storageworks Tech Day also being referred to as HP Storage Tech Day. It is a day and a half storage virtualization event hosted by HP, and I have the privilege of attending along with several other storage and virtualization bloggers.

The line up includes (with twitternames):

• Nina Buik (@NinaBuik)  Connect Community
• Stephen Foskett (@sfoskett)  http://blog.fosketts.net
• Robin Harris  (@StorageMojo) http://storagemojo.com
• Greg Knieriemen (@Knieriemen)  http://www.storagemonkeys.com
• Ray Lucchesi (@RayLucchesi) http://silvertonconsulting.com/blog/
• John Obeto (@JohnObeto) http://absolutevista.com
• Frank Owen (@fowen)  http://techvirtuoso.com
• Devang Panchigar  (@StorageNerve)  http://storagenerve.com
• Nigel Poulton (@nigelpoulton)  http://blogs.rupturedmonkey.com
• Simon Seagrave (@kiwi_Si) http://www.techhead.co.uk

Calvin Zitto (@HPStorageGuy) is one of the leaders of the event, and he explains our agenda in his Around the Storage Block blog post titled Storageworks Tech Day Starting Now.

“The topics we’ll cover include:

• Storage virtualization for enterprise customers – virtualize infrastructure, not just servers
• Shared storage for virtual servers (SMB-focused)
• Unified storage
• Deduplication
• Converged Infrastructure”

Other attendees have already posted about the event. Be sure to check these posts (along with Calvin’s above):

• StorageMojo off to HP’s Storage Tech Day
• HPTechDay 2009 Day 0: Colorado Springs
• HP Storage Tech Day 2009

The official Twitter hashtag is #HPTechDay, and I’ve created a Tweetgrid after the post break if you would like to watch all tweets using the hashtage roll in live. Another option is a 3 columned Tweetgrid I’ve created for the event available here.

I’m looking forward to meeting the other bloggers and learning about HP’s storage virtualization offerings. Look for more posts on the event on VM /ETC throughout the week.

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During the UCS Bootcamp in San Jose, Cisco made it clear that the value proposition of UCS is the Stateless Model. Unlike traditional server deployment use of the Service Profile (I covered the Opt-In Model earlier in this series), the Stateless Model allows the physical hardware to become generic and, since the operating system and application resides on the SAN, a server personality duplicated and restarted from blade to blade.

Cisco’s definition of Statelessness:

“In Unified Computing system (UCS) the underlying hardware (or server) can be made completely transparent to the OS or applications that run over it. The kind of environment which an OS or application requires can be moved from one server to another or can be changed very easily. This is made possible by moving resources, such as MAC addresses, WWN values, IP addresses, UUID, firmware versions and even server BIOS, from one server to another at the time of deploying the server. This is accomplished by using the concept of Service profiles; which is like software definition of a server. The concept of stateless computing facilitates much greater scalability and can be used in conjunction with virtualization to achieve maximum data center utilization.”

One of the labs during the week showcased the Stateless Model in action, so what better way to help explain this feature then to walk through it again for all to understand?

The Stateless Model Lab Overview

Quoting the lab introduction, the purpose of the lab was to:

“.. demonstrate the statelessness by booting an OS off of a SAN LUN.  The SAN connectivity and masking is specified by World Wide Names that are associated with the service profile.  When your service profile moves from one blade to the next, you will be booting the exact same SAN based OS. No configuration outside of UCS will ever be required at this time.”

The following overview is of the UCSM configurations performed in the lab. Once again, this is not a “how to” but is instead intended to provide insight into the process and advantages of the UCS Stateless Model.

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As a class and in smaller groups, I’ve participated in several discussions trying to understand UCS connectivity and communication both internally and externally to the LAN and the SAN. This post summarizes several diagrams and drawings from whiteboards, my notes, and the bootcamp manual to explain what hardware communicates with which protocol, and how redundancy and fail over works in Cisco’s Unified Compute System. If you are comparing UCS to other blade centers some details mentioned will jump out at you. I’ll conclude with some thoughts on these items.

Again I am using terminology and acronyms established in my post from day 1. Review that post if necessary.

The following diagram illustrates the current connectivity between the UCS Blades, Fabric Extenders (FEX), and the Interconnects. The diagram only includes a single chassis, a single half height blade, and a single full height blade for simplicity while covering all scenarios. Duplicate the same connectivity for each blade inside the chassis, and duplicate connectivity of 2 more FEX for each additional chassis in the solution. As shown, the 2 Interconnects can manage up to 20 different chassis if model 6140 and up to 10 chassis if model 6120. (The max number of chassis can not be achieved because 2 FCoE cables are being used to the Interconnects) Read the rest of this entry »

Last night I drove over to Palo Alto, CA from San Jose. Thanks to the gracious efforts of my Softchoice VMware National Account team (Nancy and Mike, thanks again!) I had the privilege of an informal, after hours tour of VMware Head Quarters and spent some time enjoying a meal and great conversation on University Avenue: the social lifeline of Stanford University. Seeing VMware’s home on “the hill” was amazing and really brought a new perspective to the people and products I interact with on a daily basis.

Best described as an ergonomic setting, VMware HQ sprawls out across numerous buildings ( I wasn’t counting them!) all interconnected on multiple levels by various walkways and bridges. Walking down the center of the buildings you can’t help but notice beautiful and thriving vegetation. Highlights of the campus for me were a soccer field and gymnasium with what seemed like intramural games in progress on both. The gymnasium outer wall is actually a series of glass garage doors, and inside was where the stage for the vSphere launch event was positioned.

After leaving VMware I was taken to the HP Garage: a California Landmark marking where Hewlett and Packard are credited for starting Silicon Valley.

I was able to snap a few photos with my Blackberry camera. The gallery that follows also contains an image from Google Earth that provides an aerial view of VMware HQ (from 2007) that better shows the VMware campus layout.

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Part of the materials given to us this week at the Cisco Partner UCS Bootcamp is a publicly available book. For those interested in learning more about virtualization on Cisco UCS, this quick post provides the links for ordering the book as well as to a review published by Greg Ferro of Etherrealmind.com

Order

Project California: a Data Center Virtualization Server – UCS (Unified Computing System) by Silvano Gai, Tommi Salli, Roger Andersson

Book Review

Book Review: Pro­ject Cali­for­nia: Data Cen­ter Vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion Server
Greg Ferro of Etherealmind.com

Day 2 in San Jose, CA at the Cisco UCS partner Bootcamp focused around using the UCS Manager (UCSM). We dove deeper into UCSM navigation and explored the various objects found in the web browser Java interface. There was a discussion about the process to upgrade UCS component firmware, and the day concluded with an exercise on assigning “basic Opt-In” Server Profiles to blades in order to install an operating system.  This post will touch on the last two topics as the objects are self explanatory (for the most part) once in the Java interface, and then conclude with some screen shots showing the application of a profile and the installation of ESX 4 on a Cisco blade via the UCSM.

I am using terminology and acronyms established in my post from day 1. Review that post if necessary.

Upgrading Firmware

For those familiar with management of bladecenter chassis, blades, and modules from the leading manufacturers today UCS hardware is a bit of change. Specifically, the “management module” is not found in the chassis. Management is instead performed on the Interconnect switches via the UCSM GUI or CLI. Administrators used to configuration, troubleshooting, and upgrading hardware at the chassis level could be surprised to learn that even though there is a Chassis Management Console (CMC), it is not directly accessible without a special connector possessed only by TAC or authorized Cisco Partners. UCSM controls the CMC and orders it to make the configuration changes.

Once configured, a web browser is pointed at the switch ip address and all components are upgraded from there.

Firmware upgrades can be performed via the CLI, but using the UCSM GUI makes the entire process, from downloading the update bundle to applying individual component upgrades, much easier.

All of the following can be upgraded from the UCSM:

• Mezzanine Cards (IOMs)
• Blade BMC
• Blade BIOS
• Chassis CMC
• Interconnect switches
• Blade LSI RAID controller

The upgrade bundle download is initiated from the UCSM and then is viewable in the interface, and the installable images can be assigned to the hardware.

Deploying Server Profiles

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