I’m just highlighting the iSCSI design in this post, but be sure to get a copy of Hany’s full PDF for diagrams of FC and 10GE designs as well.

Here’s an image of the BladeCenter H iSCSI design taken from the Configuration 2 layer. Click the image for a larger view.

Some things to point out why I think this diagram is so useful:

• It illustrates a combination of hardware and vSphere design to provide complete redundancy.
• Although the physical network connections are shown by the red, yellow, and green clouds, the actual redundant cabling is impossible to illustrate without making this diagram too busy to understand. For example, switch modules have 4 external ports or more and therefore create numerous cabling possibilities to 2 or more physical switches
• Shows the use of a vSwitch design utilizing both a vStandard Switch and vDistributed Switch. Note vSw0 and vSw2 are vSS.
• Multiple ESX Clusters are in this design and span across 2 chassis. I’ll quote Hany’s explanation of the detail behind the multi ESX cluster design:

“You will see two type of clusters:

• Management Cluster: it is typically a two node cluster running the management and infrastructure services. For example, if you want to virtualize the vCenter Server, the VM should be running on this cluster rather than the actual production clusters. Same thing holds true for other vCenter products like: AppSpeed, CapacityIQ, SRM and so forth. There are two reasons for doing that: the first, we don’t want to run into the problem where vCenter Server is not accessible (there are some examples published in the community but my favorites are Jason Boche’s Catch22s!). The second reason, we don’t want to either affect our workloads’ performance with our management virtual appliances or vice versa.

• Production Clusters: You can see here two production clusters (Cluster A and Cluster B). The take away from that is the following:

  • You don’t have to stick with that number of hosts per cluster, it depends on what you want to achieve, and also on some configuration maximums that may or may not limit you.
  • The nodes have to be spanned across the two chassis as numbered and illustrated in (Config 1). There are two reasons for that: Firstly, you don’t want your whole cluster to fail in an unluckily event when a whole chassis fails. Secondly, you have to keep in mind that VMware HA selects the first 5 hosts in the cluster and promote them as a "Primary" nodes, if they fail, your HA cluster fails.”

Adding a Blade Center to your data center introduces new complexity in the hardware by itself. Once you’ve set up your Blades and Chassis correctly, Haney has now made it easier to build a vSphere environment on IBM BladeCenter H. Be sure to follow the links above and read all of the many more design points in the posts on Hypervizor.com.

I look forward to more posts from Hany about designing vSphere for the various other Blade Server manufacturers as well.

Here’s some links, thoughts, and general information surrounding some of the announcements that caught my attention during the VMware Partner Exchange 2010 conference. This is by no means and inclusive list of every press release and announcement made during the conference. To be honest, I wouldn’t doubt that I missed something more significant than the handful of news listed here. Let me know if I did!

The VMware Express

I personally toured the 18 wheeler on Monday evening before the Conference Kickoff Reception. I would recommend VM /ETC readers catch this VMware View demo center on wheels when it rolls through your town.

• VMware View Hits The Road

“The VMware Express  is a datacenter and demo environment on wheels and it will be crossing the U.S. and Canada over the next year letting you, our customers get hands on with the latest and greatest technologies in your own back yard.”

NetApp’s Vaughn Stewart has a nice post about the VMware Express with great photos from inside the truck. There is also another half dozen blog posts in the form of

comments to Stewart’s post between EMC and NetApp – if you’re interested in more than photos!

• The VMware Express and View on NetApp

IBM Announces the new workload-optimised IBM BladeCenter HS22V blade server designed for virtualization

• Blade servers designed for your demanding business needs

“The HS22V blade offers extraordinary computing density and high performance balanced with flexible configuration options and simple management in an efficient server optimised for your virtualisation workloads. Building on the rock-solid durability of the BladeCenter platform, the system is designed to have no single point of failure.”

Fellow Softchoice employee Kevin Houston also covered the new IBM Blade Server on his bladesmadsimple.com blog last week. Kevin breaks down the technical details about how IBM designed this blade to be optimized for ESX 4 workloads.

• Introducing the IBM HS22v Blade Server

BlueLock Cloud Suite

BlueLock Introduces a Comprehensive Set of Cloud Computing Solutions with BlueLock Cloud Suite

“BlueLock CloudSuite includes public computing options BlueLock vCloud Express, BlueLock Virtual Cloud Professional and BlueLock Virtual Cloud Enterprise, which offer users a range from self-service all the way to tailored and expertly-managed enterprise environments. CloudSuite also offers virtual private cloud solutions which can be secured on-premise or off-premise. Each computing solution is based on VMware virtualization technology to ensure compatibility across all VMware platforms inside and outside of BlueLock’s environments.”

Other than being an obvious alternative to Terremark’s vCloud Express offering I experimented with after VMworld, BlueLock appears to indicate they want to manage customized cloud data centers for their customers as well.

Book Release: Foundation for Cloud Computing with VMware vSphere 4

Written by prominent virtualization personalities John Arrasjid, Duncan Epping, and Steve Kaplan, I was lucky enough to get a copy of this book during the pre conference PTAB meetings.

INX Announces VMware Book Release at 2010 VMware Partner Exchange in Las Vegas

Duncan also posted about the book release before PEX on his yellow-bricks.com blog

Available now: Foundation for Cloud Computing with VMware vSphere 4

I posted last year about the NFL’s use of virtualization at the Super Bowl, and I wrote my beloved Atlanta Falcons in case they needed help when the NFL made it’s  decision to standardize on IBM Blades for all 32 teams. This year, Kevin Houston, a fellow Softchoice employee and author of the increasingly popular bladesmadesimple.com blog, has posted on how the ‘09 NFC Champion New Orleans Saints have capitalized on these very technologies during the season.

Houston writes:

“Other than the obvious threat of having to relocate or evacuate due to the weather, the Saints’ constant travel required them to search for a portable IT solution that would make it easier to quickly set up operations in another city.  The Saints were a long-time IBM customer, so they looked at the IBM BladeCenter S for this solution, and it worked great.  (I’m going to review the BladeCenter S below, so keep reading.)  The Saints consolidated 20 physical servers onto the BladeCenter S, virtualizing the environment with VMware.   Although the specific configuration of their blade environment is not disclosed, IBM reports that the Saints are using 1 terabyte of built-in storage, which enables the Saints to go on the road with the essential files (scouting reports, financial apps, player stats, etc) and tools the coaches and the staff need.  In fact, in the IBM Case Study video, the Assistant Director of IT for the New Orleans Saints, Jody Barbier, says, “The Blade Center S definitely can make the trip with us if we go to the Super Bowl.”  I guess we’ll see.  Be looking for the IBM Marketing engine to jump on this bandwagon in the next few days.”

Be sure to read Houston’s entire post for more about the many features of IBM BladeCenter S

Maybe the S model of IBM BladeCenter stood for “Saints” all along!?

Not only did the National Football League (NFL) rely on IBM and VMware for the server infrastructure at it’s biggest game of the year, Super Bowl XLIII, but a CRN.com article by Joseph Kovar reveals that IBM VAR Vicom “provided 34 SANs based on IBM’s N-series storage products, as well as a server virtualization solution based on VMware to consolidate the league’s offices.”

“IBM’s sponsorship of the Super Bowl and its direct deal with the NFL for the Super Bowl infrastructure was key to signing that larger deal, which includes one chassis to be installed in each of the 32 team’s IT infrastructures, said Vic Verola, vice president of sales for Vicom Computer Services, a Farmingdale, N.Y.-based solution provider and long-time IBM partner.”

Dear Arthur Blank,

If the Falcons need local support of your new VMware Virtual Infrastructure and IBM hardware let me know.

All wishful thinking aside, it is exciting to see the NFL recognize the benefits and value of server consolidation with blades and virtualization.

Read the entire CRN.com article :IBM VAR’s Super Bowl Blade Servers Lead To NFL Deal

For information about IBM BladeCenter S and N-series storage check the following links:

• http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/
• http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/network/index.html

Read the entire article, but here’s some interesting excerpts revealing more about the IT team and how they are taking advantage of server consolidation with IBM blades and virtualization.

“That team was tasked with creating a complete IT operation for Super Bowl XLIII in a matter of weeks. Its coaches are Joe Manto, the NFL’s vice president of IT, and Jon Kelly, the league’s director of infrastructure computing. Their opponent is the same one that IT managers face everywhere: anything that can threaten system availability and uptime.

It doesn’t help matters that one of the four IBM BladeCenter S systems being used in Tampa is located on a wood floor in a tent that lacks any climate control capabilities. But so far, so good — and with the four BladeCenter boxes at different locations, and virtualization software ready to provide redundancy, neither Manto nor Kelly seems all that worried.”

Unfortunately the type of virtualization software is not revealed, and though the author only mentions virtualization in the context of redundancy, later in the article there is evidence that there has also been a significant reduction in hardware from past Super Bowls.

“This is the first year that the NFL has completely turned over its server processing workload for the Super Bowl to blade systems. Each BladeCenter chassis includes two blade servers, each with a pair of sockets for quad-core chips. In the past, the league would bring “tens of servers” to the game to provide IT support”

Updated 02.01.08 – I have received confirmation from a trusted VMware source that the NFL is a VMware customer. Also check out David Marshall’s VMBlog.com post NFL’s Super Bowl IT Team Uses IBM Blades and Virtualization for Redundancy and CRN.com’s post IBM VAR’s Super Bowl Blade Servers Lead To NFL Deal. Although neither post declares the NFL is definitely using VMware products at the Super Bowl, they do publically recognize the NFL as a known VMware customer.

Blades, virtualization, and the Super Bowl. It could only be better if my Falcons were playing.

I found out about the Computerworld.com article from the post at www.boche.net: NFL’s Super Bowl IT team gets ready for game day. I’m sure Jason would rather the Vikings be the NFC representative.

Credit goes to Aaron Delp’s post IBM BladeCenter Keyboard Lock Up for informing me on the key strokes, and now I am making sure I have a post to reference here at VM /ETC too. I have searched for this information for years, and for some reason have never found an answer.

Aaron’s post links to an IBM article about a resolution for the BladeCenter keyboard locking up – which really explains the keyboard shortcut process. The rest of this post is a cut and paste from the IBM article.

The BladeCenter has a Keyboard/Video/Monitor (KVM) switch built in to MM’s and AMM’s. To switch the keyboard, mouse, and monitor between blade servers, press the following key stroke combination

NumLk, NumLk, <blade server number>, Enter from the keyboard attached to the AMM:

Where <blade server number> is the number of the blade server bay where the blade server is installed.

For example, to select the blade server in bay 2, press the NumLk key twice, press the number 2,
and then press the Enter key.

There is currently no time out period programmed. Once the process is started by pressing the NumLk key twice, the AMM waits for a blade bay number to be selected followed by the Enter key before the keyboard is returned to normal function.

If the user does not know about this KVM feature, it will appear that the keyboard is locked after just hitting the NumLk key twice.

Once the NumLk key has been pressed twice, the MM will wait for the Enter key to be pressed to terminate this sequence. If a keyboard/mouse/video select button on one of the other blades in the chassis is pressed, the video display and mouse will be switched to that blade. However, the keyboard will remain in this “locked state” until the Enter key is pressed. Unplugging the keyboard from the MM and reinserting it into either the MM or the USB connector, on the media tray, also have no effect. The MM is waiting for the Enter key to terminate this state.

VMware Communities: ESX on the IBM System i

“So how does VMware fit in with the System i? Well in a nut shell – The System i (which a lot of big companies have) can act as an iSCSI SAN, and you can boot IBM BladeServers and IBM System x Servers from this SAN, and have your shared storage too! Why is that so great? Because the IBM System i is one of the most reliable pieces of hardware on the planet! Because your company probably already has one! Because you can have a great backup and recovery platform!”

In case you are wondering what IBM System i is exactly,

“The IBM System i is IBM’s previous generation of systems designed for IBM i users, and was subsequently replaced by the IBM Power Systems in April 2008.

In 2006, the platform was rebranded to System i as part of IBM’s Systems branding initiative. Previously it was known as eServer iSeries in 2000 and before that it was introduced as AS/400 in 1988.”

Here is some more information about IBM Blades and ESX integration from the IBM i integration with BladeCenter and System x web page:

• “VMware ESX 3.5 supported on selected iSCSI attached servers with i 6.1
  See the BladeCenter and System x models supported with iSCSI page for specific server models that have been tested with ESX 3.5.
  (12 September 2008)”
• “New Redbook: VMware VI3 on BladeCenter and System x Integrated with System i.
  Documents reasons for implementing VMware Infrastructure 3 via IBM i integration with BladeCenter and System x and guides you through planning, installing, backup/recovery, administration and management of a VMware infrastructure.
  (16 May 2008)”

Check out all of the links in this post for more detailed information on using ESX with IBM System i. Looks like I have a new Redbook to read in the near future too.

IBM System x and BladeCenter Power Configurator

From http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/resources/powerconfig/index.html:

“Energy costs are top of mind in IT today. In fact, it is estimated that each year companies pay a significant part of the purchase price of a system on powering, cooling, and housing that system.

That’s why IBM is delivering new technologies that allow our blades to use less power, generate less heat, and use less energy to cool the system than the competition. Simply put, the IBM System x and BladeCenter ‘runs cooler’ to deliver greater reliability and uses as much as 37% less energy than competitive Blades¹

Take the Power Challenge using the IBM System x and BladeCenter Power Configurator, and discover the energy savings a BladeCenter can bring to your business.”

HP BladeSystem Power Sizer

From http://h71019.www7.hp.com/ActiveAnswers/cache/347628-0-0-0-121.html:

“The HP BladeSystem Power Sizer assists facilities teams and IT staff in sizing their power infrastructure to meet the needs of an HP BladeSystem solution. Based on actual component level power measurements of a system stressed to maximum capability the BladeSystem Power Sizer enables the facilities team to effectively plan for the power consumption and heat load of an HP BladeSystem.

The sizer allows a customer to select the type and number of components within each Blade Server and Blade Enclosure and see the effect of the changes on the power consumption and heat loading.

Values obtained from the BladeSystem Sizer tool are measured with all components stressed to 100% load and is intended for facilities planning purposes only. Actual power consumption will vary with application type, application utilization and ambient temperature.

c-Class BladeSystem solutions are now supported in the BladeSystem Power Sizer.

Check out Aaron’s posts:

IBM Power Calculator and HP BladeSystem Power Sizer