Tag:

HP BladeSystem

Stick to the recipe to keep ESXi on HP hardware cooking

by Philip Sellers November 6, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

Back in September, I blogged about a potential problem between HP’s September software bundle for ESXi and ProLiant Gen8 blade servers with Emulex CNA’s. Long story short, the issue was caused by a mismatch of firmware between Virtual Connect and the Emulex CNA’s. The mismatch was induced by me, as the administrator, not keeping all my components on a tested firmware ‘recipe’ from HP.

A couple years ago, HP made a shift in the BladeSystem firmware that unified the individual components into a tested configuration and began publishing the firmware together as release sets. This meant that if you installed a recipe of Onboard Administrator, Virtual Connect and iLO firmwares, they would be more stable since they had been tested together for interoperability. About a year later, HP unified software drivers and firmware on all ProLiant systems in a similiar way with the release of the Service Pack for Proliant (SPP). The Service Pack for ProLiant did the same thing for OS level drivers and hardware firmware that the earlier release sets did for BladeSystem firmware. All components were tested together at specific levels and the SPP’s unified release made it easy for administrators to apply a blessed recipe of software across components.

HP also does a similar thing with its OEM version of ESXi, which includes additional software components that allow a Common Information Model (CIM) implementation within the OS to display hardware status among other things. Because of the add-in software, HP maintains a recipe between this software and the SPP bundle and firmware levels required and tested on their hardware platforms.

The moral of the story is to stay with HP’s recipes and SPP releases. When you deviate from these, having firmware older than recommended along with newer drivers or agents, problems can occur. In my own experiences, when I have stayed with the recipe, I haven’t experienced major malfunctions. As with any software, new releases fix different bugs and there are times when you want to move outside of a recipe, if a newer version fixes a specific issue you’re experiencing, but in general, the rule is stay in recipe.

The other great benefit that you receive as a customer is a guarantee of support. Traditionally, HP support pointed to older firmware as the first course of action for many support calls. Following the SPP and ESXi recipe models, you now get a year of support from the release date of a bundle. With this, you can push back on support and say “I’m in a supported configuration, now support me.” if you’re ever asked to update firmware without troubleshooting first. This is a great position for the customer. Support can also point to specific resolutions in release notes if there is a problem resolved that requires you to move to newer release, but following HP’s guidelines ensures that all the separate components have been tested together for the best possible operational environment that you can have.

And that advice is based on years of struggle in the pre-release set world of HP hardware, experience with HP support and my own personal lapses in following my own advice… Hope this helps you avoid my struggles…

Service Pack for ProLiant – http://www.hp.com/go/spp

VIBS Depot from HP – http://vibsdepot.hp.com

November 6, 2014 2 comments

Compute Datacenter Storage Virtualization

Squeezing the ultimate performance out of vSphere

by Philip Sellers June 2, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

Over the course of the past few months, I have had the opportunity to compare physical workloads directly against virtualized workloads. As workloads have moved into vSphere in the environment that I support, we have had the opportunity to compare workloads head to head, pinpoint some bottlenecks and remedy them in our environment. In addition, I have spent a considerable amount of time researching running business critical applications inside of vSphere.

Power Profiles Matter with Performance

In Elias Khnaser’s PluralSight course Best Practices for Running XenApp/XenDesktop on vSphere, he says to check the power management settings of your servers, particularly in blade servers, since they many come with a dynamic power profile based on processor performance states (P-states). P-states conserve energy in servers by operating the processor it different power levels. With a dynamic profile, it may be lowering power to the CPU in order to save energy, but at the expense of optimized performance.

hp_power_profile I checked this on my HP ProLiant blade servers and they were set to the default “Balanced Power and Performance.” The label doesn’t sound all that bad, but on further searching, this setting enabled the dynamic power management within a server. With this enabled, the CPU’s seemed to be powering down and taking additional time to power up when demand from vSphere increases.

Changing the Power Management setting to “Maximum Performance” ensures that the CPU stays powered fully, however, it may take additional power to do so. In my initial testing, this increased performance within my business critical applications where we are measuring transaction times. We were able to observe a decrease in the transaction times by nearly one half.

ilopowersettings

HP has a technical whitepaper outlining Power Regulation in ProLiant servers. I found two ways that you can adjust the power profile – both by entering BIOS during boot and also in the iLO on ProLiant systems. For ProLiant G7 and Gen8 systems, the iLO power profile change is instantaneous. For G6 and earlier systems with iLO 2, it appears to activate on next boot. I also found that depending on the profile setting on the hardware, vSphere presents different options at the hypervisor level. When the server is in dynamic mode, vSphere is able to configure a profile from the Configuration tab of the host. When set to “Maximum Performance”, the ability to change or set a profile is not available in vSphere.

In addition, VMware has a knowledgebase article (1018206) with troubleshooting steps for poor performance based on power settings. This KB article details not only HP ProLiant servers but also Dell servers.

And finally, there is one more place to check and that is the power profile settings within your Guest OS. Setting the profile to a high performance profile may also have a positive impact on performance.

Training: Business Critical Apps on vSphere

VMware has made some great online training available to all customers and the same courses are available to partners who seeking accredittation for virtualizing business critical apps (though Partner University). Each course is a 3 hour, online self-paced class.

Paravirtualized SCSI driver

paravirtual2 VMware unanimously makes the recommendation to the the Paravirtualized SCSI adapters within guest OSes when running business critical apps on vSphere in all the courses linked above. Paravirtualized SCSI adapters are higher performance disk controllers that allow for better throughput and lower CPU utilization in guest OSes according to VMware KB article 1010398. The same KB article also gives step by step instruction for adding the controller and driver into Guest OSes.

Reserve the Entire Memory Allotment

reserveallguestmemory VMware recommends reserving the entire memory allotment for virtual machines running business critical apps. This ensure no contention where high performance applications are concerned. vSphere 5 and higher with virtual hardware version 8 or higher has a checkbox that allows for reserving the entire allotment of vRAM, even as allocations change.

Avoid Thin on Thin Storage Provisioning

From my own experience, running vSphere thin-provisioning works great on array technology that does not have native thin provisioning capabilities, but if the storage has thin provisioning at the array level, use that and instead use the thick provisioning in vSphere, however which thick provisioning option to use varies by array.

While moving an application onto vSphere in my environment, we had development setup on an array without thinning capabilities and production on an array with thin provisioning. The production environment took more than double the time to perform the data build-out when utilizing thin on thin capabilities. Once we noticed this, investigation showed that it was thin on thin that was causing the performance derogation. Once the disk allocated the blocks within the VMDK, the performance derogation disappeared. Our theory is that the slowdown occurs when allocating new blocks for data.

Converting the production virtual machine to thick disks by performing a storage vMotion to a new LUN caused the build to complete in less time than on the development VM backed by the array without thin capabilities. In my particular case, it was an EVA without thin capabilities backing development and a 3PAR with thin provisioned LUNs backing production. The recommendation for 3PAR is to use “Thick Eager Zero” disks since the 3PAR will recognize and zero out the space of the ‘eager’ zeroed disks. I have seen other recommendations for different arrays, where many recommend the “Thick Lazy Zero” disks.

Thin on thin also presents more challenges in estimating and accommodating growth in an array over time. Any thin provisioning technology should be monitored for over-allocation to ensure that there is adequate room for growth on the array. Doing thin on thin may obstruct this view somewhat, so proceed with caution and know that you’re likely losing some performance.

June 2, 2014 0 comments

Compute Datacenter Software Storage Virtualization

HP announces OneView integration with vCenter Server

by Philip Sellers February 10, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

oneviewheader

Today at VMware Partner Exchange (PEX), HP announced vCenter Server integration for its HP OneView systems management package. Using REST API calls to HP OneView, the vCenter plugin is now able to initiate actions in HP OneView directly from the vSphere Web Client. HP OneView, introduced last September, is a central platform of the Converged Systems group and it is the glue that takes disparate components and makes them into a cohesive solution. The current version has support for HP BladeSystem, Virtual Connect and Gen8 ProLiant blades and rack-mount systems. Proliant G7 blades are also supported. It has a roadmap for adding support with HP networking and HP storage in the future. HP OneView provides both deployment, management and monitoring capabilities so that administrators can build out solutions and maintain solutions.

HP Grow Cluster - vCenter with OneView

As part of a demo of the integration, HP is showing off the ability to completely automate the build and deployment of ESXi nodes in a new cluster and into existing clusters. By utilizing OneView’s engine, a VMware administrator can kick off the orchestration of a new hardware build directly from vSphere Web Client using a simple “HP Grow Cluster” menu item (pictured above). The menu item kicks off a wizard drive workflow (at right) that calls the tasks in OneView via its REST API. The vCenter plugin allows the administrator to pick a reference server profile, create multiple server profiles from the template and then uses HP Server Provisioning to deploy an ESXi host build plan.

At the core of OneView is the software-defined model of IT – where the underlying hardware is abstracted from the software-based configuration and settings. The reference server profiles define a base level of hardware and combined with settings, including firmware levels, BIOS settings and the ProLiant server model and generation preferences. Once the reference profile is deployed, it becomes a server profile assigned to physical hardware. Like Virtual Connect server profiles, these are portable and can be migrated between physical hardware.

Customers who are familiar with HP’s Insight Control for vCenter will notice many similarities between the OneView integration and the Insight Control integration. The OneView plugin for vCenter shows network diagrams of port mappings and configuration as well as end-to-end storage mapping from the VM to the LUN and storage array. The current iteration of OneView relies on the same Insight Control for vCenter storage plugin. OneView has yet to adopt storage control and management directly into its platform, though it seems safe to expect its coming given HP’s direction.

The majority of this announcement is that VMware administrators can now kick off OneView tasks directly from the vSphere Web Client, monitor and view the progress and completion of the tasks it spawns. OneView is still in early in its life, but the interface is simple and intuitive. Its not overly complex at this time and its build with modern concepts, like search, deeply integrated into the core product. Extensions like the vCenter plugin are great enhancements for administrators who are accustomed to working in a native platform and gain access to the capabilities of OneView directly from a familiar console. This release continues on HP’s track record of delivering usable functionality directly to VMware administrators from vCenter.

The HP team has a video demonstration of the HP Grow Cluster feature in the vCenter Web Client posted at hp.com. It is definitely worth a watch to see the entire process orchestrated with just a few clicks and settings.

February 10, 2014 0 comments

Compute Datacenter Software Storage

HP shows off OneView, a consolidated platform for converged management

by Philip Sellers December 10, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

In September, HP introduced its OneView platform for converged management. When first introduced, many of my fellow bloggers and I saw it as an appropriate replacement for HP System Insight Manager (SIM), but what we found is that OneView aims to go further than SIM was ever capable and with a cleaner and easier to understand UI. With OneView, HP is looking to bring together disparate management into a centralized console which can handle computer, storage and networking in a unified approach.

This week at HP Discover, Tom Joyce, Senior Vice President and GM of Converged Systems talked with our group of bloggers and it was clear that within the HP Converged Systems space, OneView is going to be the common management plane for all of the infrastructure – both servers, storage and networking. It is a major component of the Converged Systems strategy and a component that HP is investing heavily in developing.

Interface & Support

In terms of UI, HP took a ‘radically simple’ approach to the interface. It is a massive contrast to the busy and complex interfaces HP has designed in the past and at first pass more closely resembles a solution like Dell/Quest’s Foglight dashboards. All of this is welcome change. By heavily summarizing data and getting critical alerts and problems in front of an administrator, the systems potential usefulness increases exponentially.

Not neglecting the need for detail, OneView has an integrated search feature throughout the UI meaning that the details needed are a quick search or drilldown away.

With the initial release, HP OneView supports HP BladeSystem deployments with G7 and Gen8 blades and Gen8 rack-mount ProLiants. Like Virtual Connect, OneView creates server profiles which can be applied to individual blades but takes the concept a step further by also offering the ability to set lower-level BIOS settings on a blade that Virtual Connect does not address. While the initial compatibility list is very limited, more components will be added over time, though no one should expect older generations of server since much of the capabilities relies on iLO4 and other recent HP innovations.

Offering Context

Building upon the ‘Sea of Sensors’ concept that it introduced three or four generations of ProLiants ago, HP is driving towards a unified view of the physical environment surrounding its servers in the datacenter. HP’s Gen8 ProLiants introduced new smart power adapters which assist with mapping and locating hardware within smart racks in a datacenter. OneView is capable of building maps of these smart racks and smart power in order to identify where equipment is located, to identify hot spots and heat issues, and beings to aggregate the data obtained by the sea of sensors and offer context to it.

OneView also offers context for the interconnections of infrastructure as well as the physical environment. OneView offers great overviews of connection points between the server, its enclosure, the network sets and interconnects. It is a logical next step to extend this to connected storage and networks in future iterations.

December 10, 2013 0 comments

Compute Datacenter

HP Discover: Proliant Gen8 pushes intelligence end-to-end

by Philip Sellers June 7, 2012

written by Philip Sellers

HP is pushing intelligence and sensors end-to-end in their newest generation of Proliant servers. The intelligence gained from their Sea of Sensors is critical to proactively predict and reactively respond to hardware conditions and causes of these conditions. By logging and analyzing the data from these sensors, HP is hoping to correlate events or conditions in one area that may cause a fault or failure in another. And by aggregating this data all up into their Insight Online cloud offering, they hope to aid customers by using the data gained from other customers.

I spoke with John Gromala, director of product marketing for industry standard servers at HP, and Keith McCauliffe, chief technology officer for industry standard servers at HP, about the innovations and features that were built into the Proliant Gen8 in the bloggers lounge.

By building all the hardware sensors and notifications directly into iLO, the system is online and monitoring the environment and hardware before the POST process completes on the main system. iLO also has its own logging built-in and the optional Insight Online will allow the information to centrally logged for analysis by the customer and HP, enabling proactive alerts and proactive service calls to prevent failures.

“Not only are we monitoring the information, we’re logging the information persistently, said McCauliffe. “In the event of a server fault, what were the pre-existing conditions before that happened?”

“Sometimes you don’t even know what changed,” Gromala added.

That sort of information is invaluable to getting the system back online as quickly as possible. As with backup, its not fast backup, but fast recovery that the user really cares about. Identifying what failed or had a fault at the hardware level may be critical to resolving the issue quickly.

“As system designers, our engineers are trying to look for cause and effect, proper behavior or misbehavior,” said McCauliffe. “We’re going to put a lot of sensors in because we want the telemetry of what’s going on, but we want useful tools to abstract that.”

And those tools are what make the information useful to end-users. The tools built into the iLO will offer context to the data the sensors are providing. And since iLO is really a separate computer on its own, even in the main server will not boot and you cannot collect diagnostic data, the data in iLO would be available for analysis.

Out of all the conversation, I was struck by how responsive many of the innovations in Gen8 are to address real-life problems of the IT administrator. There are many more innovations in the Proliant Gen8 line that are direct responses to customer requests – such as the enhanced drive carrier with indicators to show when not to remove the drive, a new Service Pack for Proliant (SPP) firmware and driver distribution.

Particularly with the SPP, HP directly addresses complaints of many server administrators that firmware and driver updates are very disruptive and hard to deploy in their production environments. The SPP offers a way to manage and push updates, many of which no longer need reboots, and stage them in a way that they are activated by a scheduled reboot at a later time. The center of this innovation is a new version 5 of the Smart Update Manager. This tool allows an administrator to download a repository of firmware and drivers, which were developed and tested together (another change), and then scan and patch multiple servers from a single console.

The message that this sends to customers is pretty clear, though. HP is listening to customers and their issues and trying to address them in the best ways possible. That a good thing to hear as an HP customer, like myself.

Disclosure: HP sponsored my trip to HP Discover, covering all travel expenses, however HP does not control the content of the posts that I write based on my attendance to the show. The thoughts, impressions and information contained in this post are my own.

June 7, 2012 0 comments

Compute Datacenter

HP moving from release sets to ‘Service Packs’ for BladeSystem

by Philip Sellers January 30, 2012

written by Philip Sellers

HP is moving away from the release sets that it introduced in 2010 to a unified Service Pack for Proliant (SPP) model for updating firmware and software on the HP BladeSystem along with all Proliant servers. I had previously reported about the software release sets back in June of 2010.

In the latest realignment, HP is consolidating these release sets with its Proliant Support Packs (PSP’s) and the Firmware releases that were previously three separate distributions. In addition, HP is adopting a date style of numbering, matching the release set scheme, rather than the version numbering previously used with PSP and Firmware releases. This will allow administrators to quickly recognize how behind a system is from the current release.

Consolidation also allows a single interface, qualification schedule and unified release for customers on all systems. Although a solid step, the release sets did not completely match the release of Firmware DVD’s from HP and sometimes there were issues with support where case workers asked that you update firmware out of compliance with a release set. During their first year of existence, release sets came out often and in many ways, shored up stability in our blade environment, but in the past year, they seemed to have lagged behind in releases.

Back when I first covered release sets, I also noted that it the release sets were a very good thing for customers, since the sets gave a supportable configuration and schedule of compliance. Although I didn’t say it, compliance meant that the customer could finally force the support side of HP to work a case instead of hiding behind the ‘please patch to latest firmware’ excuse. My hope is that the SPP will do the same in a unified firmware and driver software release.

On many of our critical systems, we have observed an increased interdependency between the firmware versions and the driver versions which need to be loaded together to gain stability. Consolidating all these separate releases into a single engine and distribution makes logical sense as these dependencies increase.

In an effort to target exactly what customers need, there will be a master distribution of the SPP along with 6 additional subset versions targeted towards specific needs, per the HP website. These will be smaller, which translates to faster downloads and a more customized installation, including only what is required for these solutions.

HP touts four major areas of improvement by introducing the SPP — it reduces customer qualification cycles, reduces resource usage, maintenance windows and downtime. Since firmware patching is typically not the most fun part of a system administrators job, reducing the frequency of these upgrades is a welcome change.

HP plans to offer 3 to 5 of these SPP’s per year. The first version released is version 2011.09.0 and 2012.01.0 is expected soon.

January 30, 2012 1 comment

Cloud Compute Datacenter Networking Software Storage Virtualization

Simplifying IT support and deployments with converged systems

by Philip Sellers August 13, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

All IT solutions will experience problems at some point in their life. Supporting IT solutions is difficult, time-consuming and costly, but also a fact of life – a fact as a systems administrator I am thankful for. It means, I have a job. Problem solving skills are absolutely necessary, but all administrators need the expert help of vendors’ support departments when our knowledge runs into something we just don’t know.

Unfortunately, when multiple vendors’ products are coupled together as a solution, support can become nasty as vendors point back and forth at each other while trying to get to a resolution. The more complex the solution, for instance a SAN, the more difficult to troubleshoot through the multiple layers of software, firmware and hardware, even multiple vendors of the solution. And, I believe, the hassle has made customers seek a better way.

August 13, 2011 5 comments

Compute Datacenter Storage

Overview and experiences with HP BladeSystem.

by Philip Sellers August 13, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

For anyone who found this post looking for my week two post for the Blogger Reality Show, please see the Simplifying IT support and deployments with converged systems post instead. This post is just more or less general info about HP BladeSystem and my experiences.

I worked with HP to deploy two HP BladeSystem C7000 chassis in my work datacenters about three years ago. Our group has two enclosures in to separate datacenters which are mirrors of each other in configuration. At first, we only ran Windows clusters on the BladeSystems with one node in each enclosure. We considered this a safe way to get familiar with the technology, management and understand the reliability of the BladeSystem in our environment. We, as others have, did find the enclosures to be very reliable, eventually reconfiguring them to add Virtual Connect Flex-10 and moving some of our ESX onto BladeSystem. Today, HP BladeSystem runs a very large percentage of our overall infrastructure.

August 13, 2011 1 comment

Compute Datacenter Storage Virtualization

Scale and standardize with a converged storage solution

by Philip Sellers August 4, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

Simplify. Eliminate duplication of effort. Reduce costs. Play to your core competencies. Standardize. All of these are themes I have heard in my own company as we have looked at ways to improve our IT operations. Like many companies, we try to form a plan of where our IT operations should move, motivated by making IT highly available, redundant and cost efficient.

Converge. That theme is a tougher sell in my employer’s environment. There is resistance to converging, whether it’s IP telephony on our data network versus converging our fiber channel with fiber channel over Ethernet and putting it on our same core Ethernet network. Same would go for iSCSI, if we had it. We tend to separate for simplicity reasons, but there are certainly cost savings in convergence.

Why converge?

Convergence is a major trend in IT, today, although it goes by many names. But like most trends and buzzwords (think Cloud), your mileage will vary among vendors and interpretations of the buzz. HP’s approach to convergence is largely centered around standardized x86 hardware for both server and storage platforms. In addition, the converged storage platforms within HP are about scale out, with multiple controllers to handle unpredictable and unruly disk I/O with ease.

August 4, 2011 8 comments

Compute Datacenter

HP adds firmware release sets for Bladesystem

by Philip Sellers June 22, 2010

written by Philip Sellers

HP has updated their framework for BladeSystem firmware and driver releases through a consolidated Service Pack for Proliant. See this post for more information.

HP added the idea of release sets for Bladesystem firmware starting in January. On a conference call yesterday, we were alerted to the new release set certification process. Previously, HP had been releasing firmware for the Bladesystem as components and firmware were updated, which they still do, but the idea of a release set adds an additional cross-testing process to ensure that firmware from each component works together correctly. There was no publicly disclosed certification process prior to January.

To quote the HP engineer on the call — there were just too many combinations and possibilities to be able to certify all available firmwares — and so the idea of a release set began in January. The release sets are available in a compatibility matrix on the HP Bladesystem page (http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/blades/components/c-class.html) — look at the Compatibility tab.

The good news is that in our environment, we are close to compliance with the January release set. The only thing out of compliance for the January release is our blade ROM, PMC and iLO firmware, but, as we were also informed, this is not a good situation to be in.

Something I already knew is that we have a bottom-up firmware topology for the HP Bladesystem — meaning that we have to update the bottom level components first and then move up. I knew this applied to the interconnects and onboard administrator modules, but it also extends to blade servers also. In addition, the blade servers are at the lowest level and should be updated first — particularly the iLO.

The reason for this is that new OA and interconnect firmware may introduce features and if the PMC or iLO is not aware of these features due to out-dated firmware, erroneous might be passed and all sorts of things could happen — at worst, random server reboots.

iLO firmware 1.81 is particularly susceptible to the random reboot for Windows blades. If you are running 1.81 and have Windows OS loaded, you should upgrade to 1.82 as soon as possible. See http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?locale=en_US&objectID=c01802766 for more information. Other OSes – Linux, VMware, XenServer – are not affected.

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/service_packs/en/index.html

June 22, 2010 2 comments