VM /ETC

Archive for February, 2010

The final day of HP Blades Day consisted of some quick morning sessions and then the Factory Express and HP Pod tour. The guided explanation of the HP server assembly process was clearly the pinnacle of 2 days that was already filled with many highlights.

Here’s a 30 second video of some of my photos from Friday.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

For more information about HP’s Factory Express program that let’s each customer “choose how your solution is built, tested, integrated, shipped and deployed” check out this video.

For more information about the HP POD “ship to order datacenter” check out this video.

If you’d like to see all my photos from Wednesday through Friday check out my full HP Blades Day photo album. I’ll eventually add the HP Blade Day photo album to my Photos page here on VM /ETC as well.

Disclosure – I toured the HP Houston, TX facilities during an all expenses paid blogging event hosted by HP.

VM /ETC readers will probably recall that I love to report on the NFL and it’s teams use of virtualization and blade centers. I must say, as a man born in Philadelphia who is a long time Atlanta Falcons season ticket holder, I had to “do what’s right” and publish this post. All rivalries aside, I find examples of popular events, teams, and venues such as Cowboys Stadium to be the most interesting real world virtualization implementations to reference.

Disclosure – I was introduced to this video during an all expenses paid blogging event at the HP Campus in Houston, TX.

HP Blades Day Day 1 was a busy day. Although there were some Internet connectivity challenges for me, I was surprised to find a good bit of conversation on twitter was available from other attendees. Today will be another day of more great content presented by HP. Look for posts with session information and opinion over the next few days.

Here’s a 30 second video of some of my photos from Day 1.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

The following is our agenda looks like for day 2:

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Wednesday night in Houston, TX was a great finish for a day of travel. By 6 PM all of the HP Blades Day attendees had made it to the hotel, checked in, and met in the lobby. After some general group socializing we ended up grabbing some pizza at a nearby restaurant called Pizza Fusion. It was a great evening with a great group of folks!

Here’s a 30 second video of some of my photos from last night.

Today we will get down to business at HP. Here’s what our agenda looks like:

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I received an email today from VMware addressed to all customers about the end of availability for VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB). Quoting from the beginning of the communication but not the entire message, it reads:

“The purpose of this letter is to inform you of our vSphere backup product strategy, ongoing enhancements, and end of availability plans for VMware Consolidated Backup.

VMware Backup Product Strategy
VMware released vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) with the vSphere 4.0 release in May, 2009. VADP is the next generation of VMware’s backup framework. We have also been working with several backup partners to integrate VADP into their solutions to make backup of vSphere Virtual Machines fast, efficient and easy to deploy compared to VCB and other backup solutions. Several of our major backup partners have already released VADP integrated backup products and we expect most of the major backup partners to have VADP integrated backup software by the upcoming feature release of the vSphere platform in 2010.

Future Product Licensing
Given the strong interest and adoption of VADP by our backup eco-system and the benefits offered by VADP compared to VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), we are announcing the End of Availability for VCB starting with next vSphere feature release in 2010. Starting with the next vSphere platform feature release, VCB will be removed from vSphere platform. VADP integrated backup products (including VMware Data Recovery) will be the recommended option for efficient backup and restoration of vSphere Virtual Machines. This will allow us to focus new value added feature development on VADP instead of two backup frameworks (VCB and VADP).”

[omited]

I’ll go out on a limb and say that most of the VMware community will

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Tomorrow I leave for Texas to attend HP’s Infrastructure Software & Blades Tech Day at the HP campus in Houston, TX. HPBladesDay is taking place on February 25^th & 26th. This exclusive blogger event was outlined in the invitation email I received as follows:

“This day and a half deep dive about the blade server market, key data center trends and client virtualization will be with HP technology leaders and business executives who will discuss the company’s business advantages and technical advances.  It will also include customers’ and their own key insights and experiences and provide demos of the products.  You’ll get an insider’s tour of HP’s Lab facilities as well.”

So, for the rest of this week I’ll be tweeting, snapping photos, taking movies, and sooner or later blogging about my experiences and HP’s blades servers.

This will be my second HP blogger event. Regular readers will recall I was also lucky enough to get invited to the HP Storage Day event at the Colorado Springs HP campus last Fall.

Podcast Coverage

Greg Knieriemen, also a HPBladesday attendee and the infamous Infosmack podcast host, has asked me to record another Infosmack episode from Houston with him. GestaltIT’s fearless leader and blogger extraordinaire Stephen Foskett will also be joining us on the show as well as in Houston at HP’s event. I’m willing to bet that several other of the bloggers in attendance could end up on the podcast, so look for another great Infosmack talk next Monday when it is released.

HP’s own blogger (Around the Storage Block blog) Calvin Zito (@HPStorageGuy) will also be there. Since Zito has also recently started his own podcast, look for great coverage in all social media formats from him as well.

Twitter and Blogs

Knieriemen has already created a Twitter list.

Twitter / @Knieriemen/HP Blades Day

You can also follow HP Blade team (BladeNews) on Twitter

The official event Twitter hashtag is #HPBladesDay

Here’s a list of other bloggers attending, (but not a complete list): Read the rest of this entry »

ESXi doesn’t have a Service Console like ESX. Therefore, you can’t SSH to the server without entering unsupported mode. That process may be a hassle if all you need to do is modify VM configuration files. Of ourse, you could use the Datastore Browser from the VI/vSphere Client, but to make file edits you would have to download a file to your desktop, edit it, and then upload the changed version back to ESXi again. On the other hand, with Veeam’s free FastSCP editing files on ESXi datastores is easy.

To be clear, you can’t edit configuration files of the ESXi host itself with FastSCP, but there really should not be a need to do so. That’s one of the benefits of ESXi not having a Service Console!

Download FastSCP here. You will have to register with Veeam first, and the registration form will not accept a personal email. I’m guessing there is some kind of lead qualification strategy and support registration involved with this requirement for download, but I learned a work address is unavoidable. I tried to use my gmail address but received a message similar to “you must use a company email address.” The registration process ends with a confirmation email to be acknowledged before you can download, so making up a fake email is futile. Hey, it’s a small price to pay for a free, quality admin tool.

After you install FastSCP you’ll discover you have access to a trial period of Veeam Backup and Replication. I suggest exploring

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