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HP

HP VMware Technical Forum

by Philip Sellers November 21, 2008

written by Philip Sellers

I just returned from the HP Customer Focused Testing VMware Technical Forum in Colorado Springs, CO. HP’s Colorado Springs facility is primarily the StorageWorks storage products location – specializing in their XP, EVA and MSA storage arrays. I was very impressed with the amount of technical knowledge by the folks there, the facilities and not to mention the area.

The VMware Technical Forum was the first in the US, I believe, for the Customer Focused Testing group. This group has specialized in Microsoft Exchange and SQL, Oracle and SAP as product lines but recently added VMware to their testing group, as well. This group is responsible for testing different scenarios and configurations to provide some best practices and whitepapers for HP users – mimicing real-world environments and configurations.

There were two particularly impressive sessions provided from one of the Paris, France, associates in the CFT group. Christophe Dubois did a phenominal job covering VMware configurations for Exchange and typical problems of intensive transactional workloads on VMware. The CFT team specializes in the HP Storageworks products and they have an immense breadth of information on these products.

I have a couple additional topics that were sparked out of this forum that I will be blogging about in a few days. Check back for more on those.

November 21, 2008 0 comments

Virtualization

The thin client quest is on

by Philip Sellers October 21, 2008

written by Philip Sellers

We are on the quest for the best thin client for our uses at HTC. My co-worker, Jason, has been leading the evaluation process. So far, different people in my group have seen presentations from Pano Logic, HP, Wyse and we have Dell coming later this month. We have evaluated the Pano Logic solution and the Wyse solution so far, and are impressed with both.

October 21, 2008 5 comments

Projects

HP’s complex products + HP support = fiasco

by Philip Sellers August 19, 2008

written by Philip Sellers

One of my most recent projects at HTC has been implementing our HP Bladesystem (not to be confused with a BladeCenter – that’s IBM’s product!). For the most part, its gone extremely smooth and the solution is fantastic for a sprawling datacenter. It really allows you to consolidate and concentrate your computing in the datacenter.

Monday I struggled with a LUN presentation issue to a set of blades. I was trying to create a cluster for our SQL 2005 instance. I had 4 blades setup identically. I was able to have a LUN presented and bring up a cluster on two of the blade – no problem.

For the second set of blades, I setup the same configuration. I have the 1 Gig LUN presented to the SQL boxes for quorum and then rescan. Windows no see… Rescan again… Windows still no see. I troubleshot this for the rest of the afternoon to no avail. Tuesday morning, I open the support case with HP.

After being flung from one support queue to another, I realize that HP is done a fantastic job of creating silos withing their support departments – to such a degree that most of their employees only know the one particular component of a solution which they support. This has become especially true when looking at big solutions – like a blade system connected to and booting from the SAN.

After 3 and a half hours, I ended a support call which involved a total of 7 support “engineers” and at one point, I had one support guy in India who conference’d in another in India who conference’d in another in Costa Rica – talk about lag time on the phone call… My voice had to travel to India and back to the Caribbean to talk to the guy I really needed to talk to in the beginning.

Final solution – uninstall the multipathing software (MPIO) and reinstall. The servers now see the LUNs. Better than Indian support #1’s suggestion that I reinstall Windows before he troubleshot anything…

Required Disclosure:
The opinions expressed here are strictly personal opinions authored by Philip Sellers, an employee of HTC (Horry Telephone Cooperative, Inc.) and/or its subsidiaries. Any reference to, discussion of, or content regarding HTC and/or its subsidiaries has not been reviewed, approved, or authorized by HTC and/or its subsidiaries before such content is posted and does not represent HTC and/or its subsidiaries or its views and opinions in any way.

August 19, 2008 0 comments