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Conferences

Book the HP Discover conference in Vegas and save $300

by Philip Sellers May 24, 2012

written by Philip Sellers

HP Discover is fast approaching and will be held in Sin City for the second year. For an HP customer, like myself, this event is high on my list of priorities to attend. And, I have an offer for my readers – $300 off the registration fee if you book HP Discover using this link and the promo code “BLOG”.

I’m all set to attend thanks to a gracious invitation from HP, but again this year, I’ll be joined by two co-workers on-site for the event. There are lots of other conferences out there, so why does my employer choose to send 3 people to HP Discover? In short – it really is the best event of the year for HP customers and partners to see HP’s roadmap for enterprise, to get access to some of HP’s brightest and best resources on the showroom floor, and to hear presentations from the engineers and technical staff of HP for many of the products we use.

You see, my employer has been an HP customer for many years and most of our datacenter solutions are from the HP portfolio. And given the amount of HP gear we run, there is a variety of topics that we need to stay informed with. HP Discover presents the unique opportunity to see where our product lines are going and what is happening in development for new versions of the software and firmware for our products.

May 24, 2012 0 comments

The Political Challenge of Moving to the Cloud

by Philip Sellers August 31, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

The way that I see it, VMware is up for a political fight in many of its customers’ IT departments. Two things have become evident to me this week at VMworld 2011 – first, moving to the cloud is going to involve rewriting a lot of our applications and two, this is going to to be as much a political shift in our companies as a technical shift.

I think that the political issue is easier to explain, so I’ll begin there. Unlike virtualization or virtual infrastructure, the decision to move to the cloud is not going to come from the systems group in most companies. The systems groups may be able to advocate the change and provide the reasons for it, but it is going to have to be a strategic move from higher management. The tangible monetary benefits of cloud are less clear than with virtualization, whose primary motivators were increasing utilization of physical machines and reducing the number of physical machines required which saved money. In other words, the IT systems group is not going to be the primary advocate or decision maker when moving to the cloud. Cloud is going to need to meet some higher business need rather than a technical need, although there are technical benefits.

August 31, 2011 1 comment

Datacenter Storage Virtualization

The week ahead > VMworld 2011

by Philip Sellers August 25, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

The upcoming week is another exciting one with VMworld on the horizon. I will be on site at VMworld thanks to Thomas Jones’ Bloggers Reality Contest, just one of the perks of participating in the competition.

VMworld 2011 will have a lot of new information to share about the newly released vSphere 5, which went live yesterday. vSphere 5 has a slew of new features, including the introduction of Storage DRS, rearchitected high availblity (HA), port mirroring in vSwitches, VMFS5 and filesystem enhancements, and many more. I hope to learn more and write about Storage DRS in more depth, as its one of the bigger feature sets added and it encompasses a lot of technology and capabilities.

The week is also one of the best networking (as in people, not wires) events of the year. With over 17,000 attendees planned this year, it is by far the largest of events I have ever attended. I’m looking forward to seeing some folks I met at HP Discover this year and hopefully meet some other folks I’ve run into on Twitter.

All in all, I’m really looking forward to next week. I always come back to work with some grand ideas after VMworld, so I expect this year to be no different.

August 25, 2011 0 comments

Apple Home Tech Personal Projects Virtualization

On this day, three years ago…

by Philip Sellers August 4, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

On this day, three years ago, I posted my first entry on Tech Talk. At the time, the idea was to try to contribute back to a community of technical resources whose blogs had contributed so much knowledge to me. I had found their blog posts about VMware ESX and vCenter invaluable and the information contained guided me along my road of implementation and kept me from making mistakes they had made. Many times, they offered caution signs and even an occasional on-ramp or off-ramp to features I had not previously explored.

Early on, I got a taste of success (particularly for a blogger with NO following) by blogging during VMworld 2008 about the announcements being made from VMware. It was the first time I had content picked up and linked to from others, and I’ll admit, it felt good. To this day, my blog still gets some traffic from web searches about VMware’s Fault Tolerence feature.

Those early results did not turn into overnight success. After VMworld 2008 and 2009, the blog has received relatively low numbers of visits, participation and readership. I allowed it to languish with only a few updates here and there. The growth has been relatively slow, but recently doors are opening up. Opportunities, like attending HP Discover and the Blogger Reality Contest, are allowing me to attend great networking and technical events, to report on great new technology being introduced, and to refine my skills as a blogger. The future for this blog is looking as bright as ever and I just wanted to to take time to thank those involved for the opportunities, support and encouragement.

August 4, 2011 1 comment

Cloud

Intel Cloud Builders creating reference architectures for the cloud

by Philip Sellers June 16, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

At Intel, engineers have been hard at work creating reference architectures with its partners utilizing Intel technologies through their Cloud Builders program. Last week, a group of bloggers, including myself, had the chance to sit down with Billy Cox, Director of Cloud Software Strategy at Intel in the Blogger’s Studio during HP Discover. Cox discussed the initiatives within Intel, why they are creating these reference architectures and what Intel hopes to accomplish.

Intel created the Cloud Builder program to invite industry partners into its research facility to experiment and create reference architectures in the lab to publish to customers. Cloud Builders is not about certifying the hardware, it is about creating references for customers who are looking to be a particular type of cloud. One reason Intel is not seeking certification is that cloud technology is changing at a very rapid pace and certification process would take an extended amount of time, during which technology would have already changed.

Cox said that Intel has really focused on building the private cloud model. Intel surveyed its end-user enterprise customers and came up with a list of use cases to focus on with its partners.

While researching with its partners, Intel has been able to find some gaps in technology, particularly in the case of management software for the cloud. But the research has also turned up other gaps, such as trusted compute pools and missing audit information that would be required for compliance.

Intel has also been working on technology such as the hardware root of trust which allows for hypervisors to send a request to the Intel hardware in plain text and receive an encrypted, signed response certifying that the response is coming from the trusted hardware. This was technology that had not found a use case, but in compliance heavy environments, its finally finding implementation.

Auditing has also been difficult to produce for these environments. This is an area that Intel and its partners are still focusing.

For more information about Cloud Builders and to find details about the reference architectures published, head over to http://www.intelcloudbuilders.com.

In the interest of full disclosure, HP and Ivy Worldwide invited me and paid for my trip to HP Discover. Even though, I am trying to relay the information as impartially as possible.

June 16, 2011 1 comment

Cloud Compute Datacenter Software Storage

A potential service provider’s take on CloudSystem

by Philip Sellers June 14, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

Day to day, I work for a telephone company, though we are really much more – we sell cable TV, wireless, landline, Internet, security and home automation. [Disclaimer – these are my views and not theirs.] We have tossed around the idea of becoming a public cloud provider more than once. Last week, during HP Discover, I got my first full view of how we might realistically do that. We are not currently a HP CloudSystem customer, but I could see it fitting our needs.

HP unwrapped CloudSystem during the Discover conference in Las Vegas. CloudSystem is a full stack solution from storage, to networking, to servers and software to enable the cloud, whether it be private, public (service provider) or hybrid. So, where to begin on discussing CloudSystems – lets start with a definition.

June 14, 2011 1 comment

Trends

DiscoveringHP.com > a meta blog of HP Discover coverage

by Philip Sellers June 13, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

Fellow blogger Mauricio Freitas has created the http://www.discoveringhp.com website and he has rounded up all of the coverage from the bloggers during the HP Discover 2011 conference. I encourage you to head over and check out all of the posts about the event. The posts are grouped by day of the conference and there is a good bit of coverage on the blog. Enjoy!

June 13, 2011 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

Archiving Solutions: StoreOnce + Tape (Recap HP Discover #3839)

by Philip Sellers June 13, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

During the introduction to session 3839, we were all given a disclaimer by the presenter – a disclaimer that this sessions would be a very tape heavy session. Sadly, I was hoping for some good information about the StoreOnce product. But I should have keyed in on the word archiving in the title, because the session’s core was about utilizing tape for archival and not backup purposes.

Even while disk-to-disk backup has been making huge strides for backup in recent years, tape has continued to advanced and still offers the most economical media for large data stores. Traditionally tape has not been a readily readable media since it is linear and moving from place to place takes a lot of time as tape has the wind in the cartridge, but as we found out on Friday morning, HP has not relegated tape to being past its prime.

June 13, 2011 0 comments

Compute Datacenter Storage

Insight Control for vCenter (Recap HP Discover #4718)

by Philip Sellers June 9, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

A couple years ago at VMworld, HP announced a new plugin for vCenter, called Insight Control for vCenter, which pulled from HP System Insight Manager and on-board intelligence of ESX host Proliant servers and displayed system status within vCenter. Since the introduction, the Insight Control for vCenter package has grown to include a second plugin for storage, introduced in May of 2010.

The two plugins are separate and users have the choice of installing one or the other on the vCenter server when running the installation. As far as licensing is concerned, the good news is that the storage plugin is completely free of charge, but the server plugin is licensed as part of the Insight Control package, though there is no license check. The server plugin is a separate package not included with the other Insight Control installation. To obtain the installation media, go to http://www.hp.com/go/icvcenter.

The goal of Insight Control for vCenter is to enable vCenter administrators a single pane of glass, which administrators are already using to manage vCenter. By integrating the server and storage components, HP is delivering a package which also adds its own alerts to the normal vCenter alarms framework. The plugin is very vCenter centric and uses the same user and permissions, adding its own permission groups which can be given to users.

The latest version of Insight Control for vCenter includes the ability to look into Virtual Connect Ethernet on BladeSystem and allows you to visually see how VM’s map back within the Virtual Connect area and to the external ports on the interconnect bay. This is a big improvement for customers running Virtual Connect and ESX together, which has been a bit of smoke and magic which we couldn’t peer into very much.

The plugin also provides administrators with hooks into the other management software for HP. Within the server module, there are links for additional information into HP System Insight Manager (SIM), to the iLO card and to the OA from different locations to gain full visibility. The plugin does not try and replicate all functionality of these other management interfaces. The same is true for the storage plugin, which includes hooks into CommandView EVA (and I assume other management interfaces, although I have to say I have only seen it demoed on EVA).

The storage plugin includes the ability to provision storage (if allowed by security permission within the plugin and vCenter) directly within vCenter. It allows the ability to create clones and offload the work of creating the clone to the array instead of ESX. In addition, the storage plugin also reports paths and references LUNs back to their VMFS datastores and correlates data which was previously difficult to correlate between the storage management and vCenter.

Insight Control Storage for vCenter currently supports all of the current generation of P2000 MSA, P4000 Lefthand, P6000 EVA, XP and P9500 series storage arrays. Many previous generation EVA products are also supported. HP is working to integrate support for 3PAR arrays into the storage plugin.

To setup and configure the Insight Control for vCenter, the plugin adds a new icon to the home screen in vCenter where all the passwords and integration can be setup. Configuration for the storage plugin is configured from within the storage tabs on the ESX hosts. Once configured against the array or array management software (CommandView EVA, in our demo and our shop), the list of disk groups is presented and the administrator can allow or disallow write access and provisioning to the arrays from within the vCenter plugin. Save that configuration and the plugin is ready to begin querying the management servers. Once it populates a view of the storage environment, the tabs populate with a good amount of data. Data is a cached local copy of data retrieved from the storage management, so a refresh button exists in the storage plugin to pull updated information if changes are made outside of the Insight Control for vCenter plugin.

Of note with the plugin, the system information pulls from both the iLO card on the servers, from HP System Insight Manager (SIM), and with the Onboard Administrators of BladeSystems. Without HP SIM, some information is not populated. If you have a host without the Insight Agents loaded, you will only get a partial view of the server and some details will not populate. For ESXi hosts, the Insight Control plugins use CIM (Common Information Model) to pull the system information. HP also releases a custom release of ESXi which includes all the Insight functionality baked into the ESXi distribution.

In the interest of full disclosure, HP and Ivy Worldwide invited me and paid for my trip to HP Discover. Even though, I am trying to relay the information as impartially as possible.

June 9, 2011 1 comment

Datacenter

HP Discover Closing Session Day 4 Liveblog

by Philip Sellers June 9, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

I have found my seat and people are streaming in to find their seats. The closing keynote is about to begin in a few minutes. We are currently listening to a live DJ mixing video and music on stage. You may also watch a live stream from the event at http://www.hp.com/go/discover. Live updates will appear below…

[liveblog]

In the interest of full disclosure, HP and Ivy Worldwide invited me and paid for my trip to HP Discover. Even though, I am trying to relay the information as impartially as possible.

June 9, 2011 0 comments