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HP Proliant

ProLiant servers getting RESTful API for management

by Philip Sellers December 3, 2014

ProLiant servers are getting some REST – a RESTful API. One of the innovations HP is showing off on the HP Discover showroom floor is a new RESTful interface packaged as part of the iLO management chips on ProLiant servers. With the RESTful API, HP hopes to deliver future generations of ProLiant that can be easily provisioned and controlled from tools like HP OneView. RESTful interfaces are becoming the go-to standard within HP for interoperability between their products.

HP RESTful API is a management interface can be used to perform configuration, inventory, and monitoring. The RESTful API is available on Gen8 and Gen9 hardware with iLO firmware 2.0 and greater. On Gen9 and future hardware, the interface will be able to configure both BIOS and iLO settings on the server. On Gen8 servers, the RESTful API will only expose the capabilities inside of the iLO.

According to HP, a REST client will send HTTPS operations to the iLO web server and there are three modes that can be used – command line interface, file based and JSON-formatted data. The use of HTTPS is a big security plus versus many other remote management interfaces that are often

The folks at HP are working with other vendors in the market to establish a standard that they call the Redfish Specification. Redfish is supposed to create a standardized interface for IP Management Interfaces on servers to allow uniform control and reporting across multi-vendor server environments. The standardization should allow the same management software to be able to manage heterogeneous servers. Redfish is corporately sponsored by Dell, Intel, HP and Emerson.

For more information, see http://www.hp.com/go/restfulapi.

Disclaimer: HP invited and paid for my trip to attend HP Discover EMEA. The views and opinions I’ve written were not dictated or approved by HP and are my own.

December 3, 2014 0 comment

HP unwraps ProLiant Gen9 hardware, strategy for 25 more years of compute

by Philip Sellers August 28, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

This morning, HP CEO Meg Whitman unwrapped a new generation of HP’s ProLiant servers and unpacked the company’s compute strategy the years ahead. HP first introduced the server to the world 25 years ago and in celebration of that milestone, HP is looking forward to the 25 years to come. The strategy is wrapped around a focus on customer outcomes rather than the incremental tick and tock of hardware.

HP is responding to the increasing pressure being put onto IT shops due to the increase of data, data devices, apps and connections. In its research, the growth curve of incremental change in server hardware and the curve of requirements for IT shops simply don’t match. Incremental change won’t allow business to keep up with the increasing needs based on time, power or space. So the focus for the future from HP is to orchestrate and reduce the manual steps required for administrators to accomplish their work.

HP ProLiant Gen9 Family

HP see the future of compute as an increasing amount of pooling for resources, dynamically re-alloacting and re-tasking resources based on changing needs throughout the day. HP Helion and OpenStack will play a major role in the transformation of the future of compute. Traditional applications just can’t meet business needs.

I had the chance to talk with Peter Evans, vice president of HP Servers Global Marketing, this morning and he told me that the ProLiant Gen9 hardware has a strong focus on increasing the performance per dollar, kilowatt and square foot. HP has spent a lot of time working to reduce the number of manual processes and clicks that are required to perform the tasks that consume a lot of practitioner’s time.

While HP is talking about their vision for the next 25 years of compute, they’ve been delivering on this vision for the past 2 year with ProLiant Gen8. A lot of the innovation that went into Gen8 aligns with the focus that HP has with this strategy. HP has collected and aggregated data that it gleaned from the Insight Online data and diagnostics information, information provided back by their partners and based on the experiences of their professional services organization and system engineers. All of this feedback and data has gone into the prioritization and decision making of what features get the precious attention of HP development cycles. The focus is more focused customer outcomes and not just on the technology.

Evans unpacked 3 metrics of focus that HP is delivering with the Gen9 announcement. The first is economics of the datacenter. ProLiant Gen9 offers customers a 3x improvement in performance. HP has performed comparative studies against its own G6, G7 and Gen8 systems as well as competitor’s servers. The second area is time to service. It is all about optimizing the number of clicks and amount of time before customer are able to begin using a solution on the ProLiant server. In some cases, Evans says that HP has reduced the number of clicks required from 480 to just 4 using iLO, OneView, Intelligent Provisioning and other methods. The last is value of service. In that, HP is focused on providing the best possible experiences for running particular applications, enabling better density and more productivity for its customers.

ProLiant Gen9 Enhancements

Among the new features are enhancements to the iLO including iLO Federation, UEFI BIOS, updates to the Intelligent Provisioning and improvements to SmartCache, array controllers and drives supported.

iLO gets an upgrade by adding a redesigned API interface with OneView integration in mind. iLO will have a fully compliant RESTful API that OneView can use for orchestration. OneView will also make use of the new iLO Federation feature that debuts with the Gen9 systems. Althought new with Gen9 servers, iLO Federation is also available to Gen8 systems.

iLO Federation takes the standard iLO4 and allows it to multicast at boot and join other iLO on the network. From there, administrators can form groups of servers to aid in management from the iLO. The iLO Federation enables a new cascading firmware deployment method rather than sequentially and the ability to change and push settings across multiple systems easily versus making the changes 1 system at a time.

UEFI BIOS is another new feature for the Gen9 hardware. Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is the extension of EFI firmware that Intel originally developed for Itanium processors back in the 90’s. UEFI replace EFI and is a standard for low-level software between the OS and the hardware. It is meant to replace BIOS, which has limitations. UEFI is programmable, allowing OEM’s like HP to put additional software in this low-level operating system. UEFI allows HP to implement a new Secure Boot technology, though the specifics weren’t fully disclosed.

Intelligent Provisioning 2.0 will debut in the Gen9 hardware and will feature acceleration features aimed to get the server deployed and running a workload in less time and with less clicks. One of the tidbits I heard from the StoreVirtual team is that the new Intelligent Provisioning 2.0 will include the ability to deploy a StoreVirtual VSA easily. Intelligent Provisioning will go out and retrieve the latest version of the StoreVirtual VSA and deploy it onto the hardware with minimal interaction required. In addition, HP has been giving away free 1TB StoreVirtual VSA licenses with new server purchases all throughout the Gen8 line and is likely to continue [I did not confirm], making this a free and easy SAN to deploy.

In terms of workload acceleration, HP has extended support for 12 Gb/s SAS Expander cards and 12 Gb/s Smart Array Controllers and 12 GB/s SSD Drives. PCIe Workload Accelerators and HP SmartCache deliver additional performance bumps. HP says that the 12Gb/s SSDs and SmartCache will deliver 4x performance improvement.

The ProLiant Gen9 systems continue the same industrial design as the Gen8 servers, according to the systems that were shown during the webcast, with the silver and black metal bezels.

Although a lot of discussion about compute, there was absolutely no word on the processors inside of the Gen9 servers. HP did not disclose a time frame for the ProLiant Gen9 hardware to ship, either, but it did mention that the following systems would be the first to ship:

HP BladeSystem

HP ProLiant BL460c Gen9

Rack and tower servers

HP ProLiant DL160 Gen9
HP ProLiant DL180 Gen9
HP ProLiant ML350 Gen9

HP ProLiant DL360 Gen9
HP ProLiant DL380 Gen9

Solid Heritage

The ProLiant Gen9 builds on a solid platform of the ProLiant Gen8. The last new ProLiant was introduced earlier this year, the DL580 Gen8, which brought the Gen8 features to the biggest x86 rack-mount server that HP offers. The DL580 Gen8 also features the UEFI BIOS.

ProLiant Gen8 was announced back in March of 2012 and brought a lot of features directly aimed at easing administrator’s problems. The Gen8 models introduced the iLO4 management processor, HP SmartMemory and SmartDrives. iLO4 was a big step forward, moving monitoring capabilities that had been running inside of the system’s operating system into the management processor and removing the needs for hardware monitoring agents inside of the OS. iLO4 also improved on the KVM and IP management experience for administrators. At the same time, HP announced Insight Online, a system health portal that the iLO4 could report into that was hosted with HP. In addition to automatically creating cases for hardware issues, the portal also collected system information and would allow HP to identify common problems across customers and address those based on the analytics from data submitted.

SmartMemory and SmartDrives were both innovations that were direct responses to customer requests. SmartMemory provided proactive failure reporting for RAM and attempted to alleviate common memory failures. SmartDrives added an indicator to the drive to show whether it was safe to pull the drive or not. It had an illuminated warning light if the drive was in use and unsafe to remove. From an administrator’s standpoint, that was a great innovation because pulling a mirrored drive is a common fail-back mechanism in the datacenter, but pulling the wrong drive or the right drive at the wrong time can lead to a system crash.

ProLiant Gen8 also brought location awareness to the platform. Combined with smart racks, the server could identify back to HP management software where it was positioned in the datacenter and through the combination of the Sea of Sensors, HP’s software could help to identify hot spots and problems in the datacenter environment. The new blue power adapters, indicated the Location Discovery Services capability of the hardware. The feature was rolled out incrementally across the rack and blade servers in the Gen8 line.

Good Timing

The new generation of ProLiant is positioned at a great time in the industry. An IDC report this week indicates that server sales may have turned the corner and showed 2.5 percent growth versus the previous year. HP was still on top with over 25% of the revenue share.

Of all the servers that I have ever administered, HP ProLiant is my first choice. iLO adds tremendous value to me as an administrator. The Gen8 additions of drive indicators, pre-fail warnings, agentless hardware management have been time saving and welcome addtions as my server farms and responsibilities have grown. The Support Pack for ProLiant and integrated testing of OS agents, drivers and firmware has brought a higher level of stability to the hardware platforms. The addition of Intelligent Provisioning and on-the-board deployment services saved the time of having to download and burn and ISO for SmartStart to ease system deployment. And ProLiant Gen9 extends upon that with easier Intelligent Provisioning features, iLO Federation and general performance improvements. I’ll be excited when our first model rolls in…

More information is available at hp.com/go/compute and inside the official Press Kit at hp.com.

August 28, 2014 0 comment

Compute Datacenter Storage

HP bundling StoreVirtual VSA with new ProLiant purchases

by Philip Sellers December 6, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

HP is bringing software defined storage to the masses by bundling the StoreVirtual VSA (virtual storage appliance) with the purchase of new ProLiant hardware. The new offer, announced November 12, is available with 10 models of ProLiant and includes a 1TB entitlement for StoreVirtual VSA. That license can be combined on up to 3 nodes for a total capacity of 3TB of total storage in a free software SAN. And although the license is limited to 3 nodes within the StoreVirtual cluster, the storage can be made accessible to any connected servers in the site.

The new offer is attractive for small office or enterprise remote office deployments where typically only a few servers are deployed. HP is targeting the SMB market with the new offer in an attempt to gain market for the StoreVirtual software defined storage line of products according to Dale Degen, category manager for Software Defined Storage at HP.

“I’m pretty excited because this will expand the scope of who has been exposed to this concept,” Degen said during a call this week.

Chock full of features

The free 1TB licenses are no gimmick. The licenses include the full package of StoreVirtual capabilities, excluding Adaptive Optimization. Those capabilities include large enterprise features like asynchronous replication, snapshots, thin provisioning, network RAID and storage clustering. The only thing not included with the 1TB license is HP’s Adaptive Optimization feature for sub-LUN tiering and support. Users who want support for the StoreVirtual can upgrade to a retail copy of StoreVirtual, with pricing beginning at $3,000 list for 3 nodes of 4TB each and includes 3 years of support. Although the free licenses are limited to 3 node clusters, customers are free to create multiple clusters and the StoreVirtual Centralized Management Console manages multiple storage clusters easily, which is a great benefit to larger companies who may have StoreVirtual storage at both primary and remote sites.

The free licenses are easy to obtain, according to Degen. Any of the eligable ProLiant servers shipping after November 1 include a sticker with a key that can be used to unlock the license from the HP website. Customers can take their keys and and fulfill the request, download the VSA software package and retrieve the licenses.

From personal experience, the deployment process of the StoreVirtual VSA is very easy. Users can obtain the ‘Zero to VSA’ toolkit, as Degen called it, from the HP website which offers a streamlined deployment process for the VSA. In my lab environment, the manual deployment steps took about 10 minutes – mostly pointing the wizard to your vSphere or Hyper-V environment and then letting it push out the appliance. Deegan also said that the Zero to VSA toolkit includes a CLI environment which could let power users automate the deployment in enterprise environments.

SMB users: what is StoreVirtual and what’s a VSA?

Many SMB users may not have heard of HP StoreVirtual and may be wondering what it is all about. At a high level, StoreVirtual takes the local storage inside of a server and uses software to pool the storage and offering it up as an iSCSI based SAN. Multiple servers deployed with StoreVirtual also pool together and replicate among each other to create a RAIN (redundant array of independent nodes) configuration. Like RAID, RAIN is the concept of stripes or mirrors for the data between nodes. StoreVirtual is a software-only solution, although HP also sells hardware solutions created around StoreVirtual software. Originally created by Lefthand Networks, the StoreVirtual continues to run the Lefthand OS on bare metal installs and inside of the VSA or virtual storage appliance. Lefthand OS, formerly known as SAN/iQ, is currently at verison 11 and is a very mature product in a market full of new solutions.

StoreVirtual’s feature set is also on par with much larger enterprise storage platforms, but by utilizing existing storage or servers, it offers a much lower price point for many customers looking for SAN storage. Virtualization and particuarlly vSphere have pushed many SMB users to look towards SAN solutions to accommodate virtual workloads and provide highly available storage.

The VSA (virtual storage appliance) concept is an outgrowth of the Lefthand OS within a virtual machine. Like installing Lefthand OS on bare metal hardware, the VSA uses onboard, local storage under the ESXi or Hyper-V hypervisor and creates pools on this storage so that it can be served up for any number of uses on the network, but many times that use case is to store virtual machines. While the VSA can present storage back to its local virtual host machines, it can also be used by any other server or virtual host with connectivity to its SAN network.

Sounds great, how to I get it?

For all the latest information about the offer, about StoreVirtual VSA and about how to take advantage, go to the HP website at http://hp.com/go/FreeVSA.

December 6, 2013 0 comment

Datacenter Home Lab Home Tech Projects Storage

Endless possibilities for a MicroServer

by Philip Sellers October 1, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

ReviewMicroserver

Lots and lots of Possibilities

This weekend, I was able to get the Proliant MicroServer Gen8 setup and powered on in my lab. Its currently burning in and I’m doing some testing with it. What do I think? Well, you’ll have to wait until I have had more time with it before I share my impressions. But that hasn’t stopped me from thinking about use cases.

Use Case – Creating a Lab environment

Beyond the stylish exterior, the HP Proliant MicroServer Gen8 can fit into a lot of possible environments and use cases. The first one that comes to mind is my own – the home lab. As an IT professional, its become imperative that I have a lab environment at home where I can test software and solutions. I have gotten lots of offers for trials and software from blogging and for solving my problems at work.

Many of my peers build their own whitebox systems and I have attempted recently, too. I hadn’t built a computer in close to a decade. And my first experience trying to build a whitebox has been bumpy. I’ll admit, I have enjoyed using a soldering iron again, but it can be frustrating trying to piece together a compatible solution. I’d prefer to buy something ready made and that makes the MicroServer Gen8 really compelling to me. Time is valuable, so the time I’ve spent tinkering could have been more productive if I just bought a ready-made system.

Use Case – Networked Storage

With four drive bays, the Proliant MicroServer Gen8 is capable of up to 12TB of storage on board with 3TB drives in each bay. That makes it a viable candidate as a NAS solution for home or business. There are so many implementations like FreeNAS and Openfiler to turn the MicroServer into a NAS appliance.

In addition to just file sharing, these software storage solutions have lots of add-on functionality to take basic file storage and make it useful in the home for being your media repository of movies, TV shows and music and being the source for streaming to your TV-connected box, your Android or iPhone or even some home stereo systems. Add-on a VPN solution and it becomes your personal media cloud when you’re away from home, too. FreeNAS can also serve as a destination for TimeMachine or other backup software solutions, so now not only primary storage but backup of your PCs and Macs.

Even again in a home lab situation, NAS distributions support iSCSI and NFS, making the MicroServer a viable storage target for VMware and other virtualization in a lab environment. The NAS proposition has uses in so many ways. In a lot of ways, this use case of a Proliant MicroServer offers a better performing and possibly lower cost alternative to a Synology or Drobo NAS device. And if your needs change, you can alway repurpose or hand-me-down this server, where the others are only ever capable of being a NAS.

Use Case – Virtual Host

Running a hypervisor on the MicroServer should just be reserved for the lab – its capable of prime time. A lot of small businesses don’t have space or need for racks, rackmount hardware or even pedestal servers. In many cases, these small businesses run on three to five physical servers anyways, so consolidating these aging physical servers to two or three MicroServers would allow the business to save power and footprint.

The Proliant MicroServer Gen8 has a remarkably small footprint, low power consumption and small heat output. It can easily sit on a desktop or a shelf and is not nearly as obtrusive as a tower, pedestal or rackmount server. While not as condensed as a blade, it could serve a similar purpose in a small business environment.

Use Case – Microbusiness

There are a lot of one and two person businesses and the number of micro businesses seems to have exploded in recent years. Perhaps its a combination of the Internet lowering the barriers of entry and the terrible economy pushing people out of traditional jobs. These businesses still have traditional needs and while many use the cloud, the Proliant MicroServer Gen8 offers a compelling self hosted solution at a price point that is competative to many cloud solutions. A micro business may need to file or print share, have a VPN or prehaps run Remote Desktop to host a local accounting or line of business application. And a MicroServer hosted onsite provides those features – along with the ability to access a Remote Desktop session from a mobile device on the road.

Use Case – App Server

A lot of small businesses who have either outgrown or need more tailored solutions than Quickbooks and those accounting packages usually require databases and other shared access. This server is more than capable of running SQL Express or full Microsoft SQL and an application on bare metal along with the application. Then there are all the customized line of business applications – from hotels, to legal, to doctor’s offices, restaurants and even mechanics. While a lot of these have cloud solutions, many companies still rely on installed, local software to run their business and a MicroServer fits nicely. Specifically thinking about point of sale in restaurants as a use case – having deployed several of those in my time – a compact server like this would be a welcome platform – especially at the price of these boxes.

Use Case – Policy, Accounts and Security in the Small Business

Then, there is always the business whose growing beyond the two or three person mark and needs to begin thinking about accounts, security and enforcing policy and automating some management. The Proliant MicroServer is great for a basic AD implementation, too. With a domain controller deployed, accounts and policy becomes possible, file shares can be more tightly secured and controlled and systems can be tied down to accounts that offer access from multiple devices. I implemented so many of these small office when I was a consultant. Managers or owners needed to lock down systems or ensure that only certain employees had access to some resources and AD makes that all possible. Add solutions like WSUS and patch management becomes streamlined and managed.

The biggest competition for MicroServer

But the biggest competition for the Proliant MicroServer Gen8 is cloud, possibly more than the bigger Proliants in the portfolio. Cloud adoption may be least resistant in the small business where the MicroServer aims for adoption. There are certainly a lot of businesses who are abandoning their client-server applications in favor of cloud solutions, but its not for everyone. But the days of client-server are far from over.

Disclaimer: HP provided me with both the HP Proliant MicroServer Gen8 for review at no charge. The opinions and views of the hardware written here are entirely my own and have not been influenced or outlined by HP. The hardware came with no strings attached.

October 1, 2013 3 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 comment