Tag:

Storage

Peer Persistence and Adaptive Optimization interoperation on 3PAR

by Philip Sellers July 7, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

This is part one of a two part series on enhancements to the HP 3PAR StoreServ platform announced at HP Discover in June.

One of the biggest benefits of being an HP invited blogger for HP Discover is the opportunity to sit and talk with architects and executives during coffee talks and importu meetings in the bloggers lounge. This gives me and other bloggers the opportunity to ask our specific questions from really technical or strategic HP staff. During the past two HP Discover events, I have had great opportunities to talk to HP 3PAR storage team members and get some great information about specific issues and some ideas on where things may be heading.

At HP Discover in Barcelona back in December, Calvin Zito (@HPStorageGuy) introduced me to Siamak Nazari, an HP Fellow and chief architect for 3PAR’s OS. I and few other bloggers had the opportunity to talk about how HP develops the 3PAR OS and the evolution of the ASIC inside the 3PAR.

In December, I asked Nazari specifically about things that break with Peer Persistence and the 3PAR advanced features. Earlier in the year, my employer had implemented a pair of 3PAR StoreServ 7400’s in our environment in a Peer Persistence configuration. I quickly noticed that the advanced feature sets didn’t fully support Peer Persistence and I was curious when we might expect that.

Peer Persistence is 3PAR’s flavor of Metro Storage Clustering for VMware. Peer Persistence allows synchronous replication between the two arrays and a seamless failover from one set of LUNs to another between arrays without interruption to the VMware workloads. The primary 3PAR presents its LUNs under a WWN as active storage paths and the secondary/replication array presents its LUNs in a secondary/passive state until the failover occurs. When failover occurs, the replica becomes the active paths and the other array becomes secondary/inactive. The failover and monitoring can be automated with a Quorum Witness to handle the failover in the event of an array failure.

Peer Persistence is the new addition to the 3PAR feature set and understandably, a lot of the other advanced features don’t recognize Peer Persistence. One of the things we realized immediately is that Peer Persistence and Adaptive Optimization do not share data. So while AO is balancing data between storage tiers on the primary array based on the read and write characteristics of data, the secondary array is not receiving all the read operations so its AO will not optimize the same or as well as the primary.

Nazari acknowledged that this is the case in 3PAR at the present time. One of the potential solutions to this is an enhanced federation between 3PAR arrays, which may get delivered in a future 3PAR OS release. There is nothing technically to prevent this type of data sharing between arrays to allow AO to optimize workloads the same across arrays, but presently the arrays don’t share the data. Federation would allow for this type of data and a lot of other data to be shared and managed centrally across multiple arrays.

But one of the things that I’ve realized is that HP, like all companies, has limited resources to apply to a large set of problems to solve. So, they prioritize features based on biggest benefit to customers and other factors.

So during HP Discover in June, I had the opportunity to talk with Priyadarshi Prasad (@Priyadarshi_Pd) about developments announced during the June event, including thin deduplication and HP’s strategy to get solid state storage down to the cost of spinning disk and I also wanted to get an update on my earlier question.

I asked again about any developments for advanced features like Adaptive Optimization interoperating with Peer Persistence. This time, we had a different conversation – one that prompted this post.

Pointing back to the announcements of the latest HP Discover, Prasad talked with me about the total cost solid state disk in a 3PAR array. This June, HP announced the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 all flash array with new 1.9TB Solid State Disks, Thin Deduplication and Adaptive Sparing. As a combination of these announcements, HP estimates it can deliver an all-flash array with usable storage at a cost of $2 per GB – similar to the cost of spinning disk. Prasad pointed out that if HP can reduce the cost of solid state storage to the same as spinning disk, would technologies like Adaptive Optimization even be needed anymore? Spinning disk is adopted for its low cost per GB, but if solid state can be adopted at the same cost, why wouldn’t customers go there instead.

While delivering $2 per GB solid state, until there is another tier of storage that is more costly and better performing than solid state, tiering technologies would become more or less obsolete. One valid observation is that non-volitile RAM (NVRAM) is coming and may present options for another, fast tier of storage, so we may see this come again, but it sounds like today that federated AO may have just moved way down the list of priorities.

As a customer with existing 3PAR with spinning disk, obviously I want to see some sort of federation and central management which also shares AO characteristics between arrays. It doesn’t do anything for customers who have already adopted spinning disk on 3PAR. Most likely, if we adopted all solid state, it will be in a new array or within a tier on our existing arrays. Its not likely for us or many customers to take existing spinning disk offline within existing arrays. So, for this reality to come to fruition, its going to take several years for arrays to refresh all-together or for new arrays to be adopted side by side.

But it certainly warrants more information and investigation to the HP claim of $2 per GB for solid state disk. That’s where part two in this series goes next – investigating HP’s 3PAR StoreServ $2 per GB.

Disclaimer: HP invited me to HP Discover as a blogger and covered my expenses to attend the event. I also spoke at a session during the event. As always, the views and opinions stated on this blog are my own. HP was given no editorial control over content or topics for my posts.

July 7, 2014 3 comments

Datacenter Storage VMware

Re Post : Veeam Best Practices for VMware on Nutanix

by Roger Lund June 19, 2014

written by Roger Lund

Derek Seaman has a nice write up on Veeam Best Practices for VMware on Nutanix

I’m a fan of Veeam, and use in production today. Thus, I wanted to share the write up.

“The goal of the joint whitepaper between Veeam and Nutanix is to help customers deploy Veeam Backup & Replication v7 on Nutanix, when used with VMware vSphere 5.x. This post will highlight some of the major points and how customers can head off some potential issues. The whitepaper covers all the applicable technologies such as VMware’s VADP, CBT, and Microsoft VSS. It also includes and easy to follow checklist of all the recommendations.”

The official whitepaper can be downloaded here.

”
Veeam is modern data protection for virtual environments, and are also a great sponsor of my blog. The web-scale Nutanix solution and its data locality technology are complimented by the distributed and scale-out architecture of Veeam Backup & Replication v7. The combined Veeam and Nutanix solutions leverage the strengths of both products to provide network efficient backups to enable meeting recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) requirements.
The architecture is flexible enough to enable the use of either 100% virtualized Veeam components or a combination of virtual and physical components, depending on customer requirements and available hardware. You could also use existing dedicated backup appliances. In short, our joint solution is flexible enough to meet your requirements and efficiently use your physical assets. For example, if you have requirements for tape-out, then you will need at least one physical server in the mix to connect your library to since tape Fibre Channel/SAS pass-thru is not available in ESXi 5.x.

“When virtualizing solution the last thing you want is your backup data stored in the same location as the data you are trying to protect. So the first best practice for a 100% virtualized solution is to use a secondary Nutanix cluster. The cluster would be comprised of at least three Nutanix nodes. This is where the virtualized Veeam Backup & Replication server (along with the data repository), would reside. Should you have a problem with the production Nutanix cluster, your secondary cluster is unaffected. Depending on the amount of data you are backing up and your retention policies, you may or may not want the same Nutanix hardware models as your production cluster. For example, you may want to consider the 6000 series hardware which are ‘storage heavy’ for your secondary cluster. The following figure depicts a virtualized Veeam backup solution.”

Read the full post.

http://www.derekseaman.com/2014/04/veeam-best-practices-vmware-nutanix.html

Thanks to Derek Seaman for the write up.

June 19, 2014 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

Storage Essentials 9.7 shows off performance enhancements and new platform support

by Philip Sellers June 12, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

This week at HP Discover, the Storage Essentials team unwrapped version 9.7 of the product for customers to see. The next release, code-named Castle, features a number of enhancements with support for several new EMC storage platforms, support for Windows 2012 and updates to support a lot of new versions of array code. Storage Essentials 9.7 also focuses heavily on performance improvements and is expected to be released in July.

One of the major shifts in architecture for Storage Essentials is a move away from embedded Oracle database to an embedded PostgreSQL database. The new database platforms appears to be less resource intensive [from my own testing], quicker to install and just as responsive as the previous embedded Oracle. Upgrade and migration from 9.6.1 to the new release migrates the data painlessly, since Storage Essentials packages its own database export utility that pulls out the data from Oracle and pushes it into PostgreSQL easily. The overall installation time is considerably less since the switch to PostgreSQL.

For 9.7, the Storage Essentials team has worked to improve load times and performance of the application. One of the changes made for performance is decoupling the topology calculation which relates elements together after discovery so that it can be run once at the end of the collection process. In my environment, the changes have reduced the time to perform a backup data collection from about an 1 hour and 20 minutes to about 16 minutes, including topology calculation, as a result of optimization in the code. Another performance improvement deals with how the data is loaded into the Java applet of the application. The improvements result in faster loads of the Capacity Manager, Backup Manager and Performance screens.

Storage Essentials is a storage resource management software. It provides topology visualization for storage environments, centralized storage system event logging, performance reporting and a wide array of preconfigured reports for the SAN switches, arrays and hosts. Storage Essentials can collect information from SAN connected hosts, monitor file servers and NAS resources, monitor capacity and performance.

Slides and additional information from the session presented will be made available on the HP Discover website.

Disclaimer: I spoke about the next generation version of Storage Essentials along with Inge De Maere and Kara McMillian during HP Discover. I worked with HP Storage Essentials team as a beta user of the new version and they invited me to share my customer experience during the What’s New session.

June 12, 2014 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

HP Data Protector will support Federated Catalyst at launch

by Philip Sellers June 12, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

This is a follow-up to an earlier blog post about Federated Catalyst, a new feature in HP StoreOnce D2D backup devices. See the earlier post for more information about Federated Catalyst.

HP_Data_Protector Without backup software to actually use Federated Catalyst, the technology itself doesn’t do much good, so my first question is when would Data Protector support Federated Catalyst. The good news is that Data Protector 8 and 9 will both support Federated Catalyst when it becomes generally available with the new 3.11 StoreOnce firmware.

I confirmed with Data Protector staff that Data Protector 9, which was recently announced and soon to be launched, will support Federated Catalyst at launch and Data Protector 8 is getting support via a patch. Users already running Data Protector 8.12 should already have support delivered for their existing backup environment.

Data Protector 9 was announced on May 14, during Microsoft TechEd, with a laun
ch timeframe scheduled roughly one month afterwards. The new version of Data Protector features enhancements for vSphere backups, including a new method to perform granular file recovery directly from full VMDK backups.

The Data Protector team also announced a new product called Backup Navigator on May 14. Backup Navigator is a dashboard and analytics platform for backup. The intent of Backup Navigator is to observe and learn how backup is running in Data Protector so that in future releases it can predict and make recommendations to improve backups and then in a third phase, it will be able to fully automate backup scheduling and operations.

As a Data Protector customer, support for Federated Catalyst should allow for easier administration and fewer required Catalyst stores in a backup environment. It is also welcome news that both the HP Storage and HP Autonomy Data Protector teams timed the release together in both products.

June 12, 2014 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

HP introducing Federated Catalyst to StoreOnce

by Philip Sellers June 10, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

b6500 This week at HP Discover, HP announced a new Federated Catalyst feature for the StoreOnce family of disk to disk backup arrays. The new capability will allow backup administrators to make large Catalyst stores on a StoreOnce and allow for data to be striped across all the back-end service sets in the array. Federated Catalyst is available immediately on the StoreOnce B6500 line and will be coming in a few weeks to the StoreOnce B6200 line.

Federated Catalyst overcomes a previous limitation in the StoreOnce family that tied a Catalyst store to a single service set within a StoreOnce device. The same limitation exists for a CIFS store or a virtual tape library store in a StoreOnce array. This is another advantage for HP’s Catalyst technology since it assists administrators who are managing many Catalyst stores.

Previously, within a StoreOnce with 2 couplets and 4 service sets, a minimum of 4 Catalyst stores would be required to use all the available resources in the device. This added additional management points and coordination for the backup administrator within the backup software. By striping the data across all the available service sets, a single large Catalyst store is possible to utilize all the available data.

There are other considerations such as deduplication ratios for stores and the number of backup streams that go into architecting the best possible backup environment but breaking Catalyst stores away from service set boundaries will let IT shops make better decisions about how to lay out stores within StoreOnce for backup. This also provides more scalability for medium sizes shops that may want to purchase a StoreOnce with a smaller initial sizing and grow it over time.

Compared to VTL technology, Catalyst offers a simplified approach to managing backup data. With VTL’s, a library is built and it is populated with emulated tape cartridges. Like physical cartridges, each one has a bar code and media label and other properties that dictate when the data on the cartridge expires and may be re-used. Within a VTL, however, if there are more cartridges than needed, the un-used cartridges will be used before any cartridges are recycled and reused based on backup policies. This leads to inefficiency and extra storage utilization within VTL libraries.

On the flip side, if the VTL has too few cartridges, then the library runs out of space and backups stop. This leads to a big management point for administrators to size and ensure the correct number of cartridges. Catalyst also improves the VTL situation by improving performance. VTL emulates physical tape and so backup software talks with it and expects a certain amount of time before a tape is loaded or unloaded and this adds time to backups. With Catalyst aware software, the D2D backup device is seen for what it really with all of its native capabilities instead of being seen as tape.

June 10, 2014 1 comment

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 Storage

Questioning HP ConvergedSystems and their Intended Purposes

by Philip Sellers May 28, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

convergedsystem

I recently had the opportunity to sit in on a call announcing a new product offering from HP ConvergedSystems. The call left me with many more questions. The new ConvergedSystem offering is built for Microsoft Analytics software and is highly tailored to doing big data analysis.

As a systems administrator, many times it is up to my group to implement and integrate our storage, networking and servers to provide infrastructure for our systems analysts to deploy their software solutions. This strategy normally works well and we use the same infrastructure for a wide range of solutions. We also reuse components several times during their life cycle. So, this is the point that I don’t fully understand HP’s strategy with the ConvergedSystems.

From what I do understand, ConvergedSystems are prepackaged solutions to help customers speed up procurement, implementation and support of a solution by bringing the customer a known configuration of storage, network, compute and software. The sales pitch is simplified management and deployment of the software solution. And on the back-end, it is intended to have better support because all the components are known and tested together and the support team is versed in all the components to support it as a single solution.

At a high level, this certainly makes sense. It’s a logical approach.

Where I have questions is the fact that it seems that most of the ConvergedSystem solutions are major infrastructure investments based around a particular software solution or use case. So, what happens in an environment if the software solution launches and then flops? Are they easily repurposed or are they so tailored to a particular solution that it’s a lost investment?

What happens with the hardware hits the end of its useful life for running Exchange? Or Microsoft SQL? Or another software package? With our existing BladeSystem and storage, we simply order refreshed hardware – something more powerful with increased RAM and CPU specs – transition the running software to the new hardware and then pass down the previous generation to be re-purposed into a new use. During the life of a blade server or a rack-mount server, it may run 5 or 6 different solutions. I don’t know if the same can be done with ConvergedSystems.

That also brings into question upgrades of the package solution – how do those work? If its third-party software, does HP deliver a streamlined upgrade that’s been tested with the hardware and management? What if it requires more CPU or RAM – can those components be easily traded or upgraded moving forward? Since the ConvergedSystems are so new, I’m not sure that they’ve been through refresh cycles yet to know.

I am obviously still learning, but I’ve spent a good bit of time around the HP portfolio – the AppSystems, VirtualSystems and CloudSystems – and I am still unclear where these fit in businesses. And given the exposure I’ve had through blogger briefings, I’m sure I’m not along with my questions. I’ll be attending HP Discover next month and this is one of the topics that I hope to get some clarification on from the HP folks.

May 28, 2014 2 comments

Datacenter Storage

Elitebook Challenge: One week, full time on an Elitebook Folio 1040

by Philip Sellers May 16, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

ElitebookFolio1040 Today wraps up a week of full-time testing of the Elitebook Folio 1040. I survived Microsoft TechEd this week without a Mac. There were some bumps along the road, but the overall experience was a good one with this new laptop. The Elitebook Folio 1040 hardware is very impressive. Some of the highlights for me have to be the battery life, the fingerprint scanner for login and passwords and the resolution of the screen. I also love the weight, or lack of weight actually, for this system. It’s extremely portable.

The battery life of the Elitebook Folio 1040 is one of the best of any computer I’ve ever used. Today, I have gotten close to 6 hours, running VMware Player and a VM and running web. The battery life also appears to be getting a little better after the first few power cycles. The battery is not removable, but coming from the Apple world, that’s a non-issue with me. For many mobile workers, a spare battery is a must-have and a non-removable battery is a show-stopper. I have one consultant friend who doesn’t even bother with a laptop power cable when he’s on-site with customers for engagements. He actually carries two extended life batteries that power him through the day with customers without the need for a cable. This model is targeted at a completely different use case, so the self-contained battery makes more sense, but it may limit its uses some.

The fingerprint scanner is really awesome. I like not having to key a password for login and I really enjoy being able to quickly login to the system. Its not 100% perfect every time, but in general, if it misses your fingerprint, it gives feedback like “move finger left” or “move finger right” which helps to know why it didn’t recognize during the previous read. The HP Client Security suite enables full integration to Windows login for the fingerprint scanner. It also has 3 challenge questions in case you get locked out of the system. I do not know how this technology works with domain user accounts on the laptop. The Elite family of computers from HP sits between the consumer and business user lines – I’ve known people in both camps who have Elite family computers. So, I will take that as an action item to follow up and test in the home lab when I return home.

The resolution of this 14″ screen is really impressive. It is capable of supporting the same 1920 x 1080 resolution – the same resolution I run on 23″ and 27″ monitors elsewhere. In fact, the resolution is so good that it borders on too small at times, but that is an easy, fixable problem – if you even call it a problem at all. I’ve always been a screen real estate snob and I really love having this many pixels to play with. Another beautiful side benefit of all the screen real estate is that my Remote Desktop sessions don’t have to resize to be used from this laptop – unlike every other laptop I’ve used – due to supporting a smaller resolution. i can remote connect to home or work and see the same displays that I would on a 10″ larger monitor. This even beats my Mac in that regard (disclaimer – my current MacBook Pro is a 2008 model, non-retina display).

The processor is pretty speedy on the unit. I have not noticed any CPU constraints or contention for any of the testing that I have done. I’m not doing any video editing or processor intensive applications on the laptop, but for general office or even power user work, the CPU is very good. The RAM could be better. The evaluation unit I have has 4GB of RAM, which I consider the absolute minimum to work. It caps out at just 8GB, however, and I would love to see that doubled for future generations. 8GB is probably my recommended minimum moving forward. I am ordering the additional 4GB SODIMM to install this week. In great news, HP ships the 4GB equipped Elitebook Folio 1040’s with a single 4GB SODIMM and an open slot. This means upgrades don’t require rip and replace to move to the full 8GB it is capable of. But, I’m also a power user and the general user is going to work just fine with 4GB of RAM. Many work today with much less than that. So, 4GB makes sense in an attempt to keep costs in check and offer choice for consumers. And choice is a very HP-centric ideal. They want to offer lots of options for their customers to meet their need the best that they can.

The speed of the storage internal to the laptop is great also. It ships with a 250GB solid state drive inside and that is split out with a utility partition and recovery partition [thank goodness]. The recovery partition saved my bacon on this trip this week and I have been much happier with the system using the system image HP shipped it with, versus my upgrade to Windows 8.1

Sound is one place that really could use work in subsequent generations – audio snobs beware. The speakers on this system are very weak. As a matter of fact, my phone was probably twice as loud as the speakers turned up to full blast on this laptop. Its really soft. I wonder if the lack of thickness contributes to the sound problem – since there isn’t a lot of space in a 1.59 centimeter thick laptop to fit the speakers. But it is really noticeable. In comparison with a similarly thin laptop – a Macbook Air – the sound is still considerably softer at full volume. I was showing off a YouTube video with some friends – with some background noise – and it was inaudible. Switched to my phone and no one had any issue hearing the video – so that was disappointing. But, for personal use and for use with headphones, the audio issues are possible to overcome.

The Forcepad trackpad has given me the most problems. I have not been able to master the click but other gestures work pretty well. I have noticed that when I tap to left click, sometimes it doesn’t register and I have to give it a little more ‘force’ to register [frusterating] – and the right click is gesture based with a one finger then two finger tap in succession doesn’t always seem to work either. Scrolling the page with a gesture, moving the pointer and swiping gestures work all of the time, but the clicks sometimes fail to register. I do seem to get better with practice, though. I have not been able to locate a way to change the Forcepad behavior. As I wrote earlier, I really like the visual design of the Forcepad versus the traditional pointing stick and traditional trackpad with physical buttons. It looks fantastic – I just wish the function matched the form in this case. I also demoed a Toshiba and Samsung ultrabook at a Microsoft Store in Houston. Both of these ultrabooks had a very similiarly designed touchpad – with no physical buttons, but they did not seem to have an issue recognizing when a click or particularly a right click was given. I suspect these issues can be resolved with a firmware update or software fix – I don’t think its hardware related since the pointer seems to go where I direct. But, I’m glad that I had a USB mouse with me. Once I began using the external mouse, my productivity on the laptop immediately increased.

I said in my first post about for this week-long challenge that when I unpacked the Elitebook Folio 1040 that I said this was a laptop I could see myself really using. I stand by that. After a week using it, it really could replace my Macbook Pro. Will it? I don’t know yet. Its an incredibly capable and long-lifed laptop. It is about a third of the weight of my ancient Macbook Pro and its fast, responsive and generally a joy to use. Anyone who is looking for a lightweight, ultra portable laptop should consider this one, especially if you don’t require or want touch and the Windows 8.1 interface. I will be continuing to review and work with the laptop and run it through other scenarios in the weeks to come. So keep an eye for additional posts. But, great job HP – my week with the Elitebook was a success – no failure – and no inability for me to work and do both my primary job when required, blogging and note-taking when needed for the TechEd conference. Success…

Disclaimer: The HP Elitebook Folio 1040 was provided to me by HP for evaluation at no cost. It did not come with any requirements or input on the editorial content of this review. The views and opinions are my own honest assessment of the laptop and have not been dictated or outlined by HP. Nor would it ever – because I want you, my readers, to know you can trust what I write when I write it.

May 16, 2014 0 comments

Datacenter Software Storage

HP has released Powershell for iLO control with more to come

by Philip Sellers May 15, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

HP showed off its new, free Scripting Tools for Windows at Microsoft TechEd this week on the expo floor. The scripting tools are specifically Powershell cmdlets for iLO control in the version 1.1 release. The cmdlets allow you to script a number of functions against the iLO management processors. The Powershell cmdlets work against iLO 3 and iLO4 which roughly equates to Proliant G7 and Gen 8 models.

Talking with Ana Machado on the showroom floor, this release is just the first of many to come that will expand the capabilities of the toolkit to include additional hardware. I logically take that to mean that we will see expanded support for BladeSystem Onboard Administrators and other components in the future, though she didn’t specifically say.

With over 100 cmdlets included in the toolkit, users will be able to common tasks easily from pre-prepared scripts. For instance, if you have a standard username and password assigned for iLO, you can easily create a script to execute and add your standard login using the Add-HPiLOUser cmdlet. The cmdlet either takes parameters through the command line or prompts you parameter by parameter during execution. Another potential goldmine is new deployments of HP Remote Support and registration of iLO4 to the service. The Enable-HPiLOERSIRSConnection cmdlet will easily allow you to set these settings for any number of servers. Just pipe in a list of destinations and then let the Powershell do the heavy lifting.

You may grab the tools from HP by going to www.hp.com/go/PowerShell with no login required.

Quick Reference of All HP iLO cmdlets

Name	Synopsis
Add-HPiLOSSORecord	Add a new HP SIM Single Sign-On (SSO) Server Record.
Add-HPiLOUser	Adds a local user account to the iLO.
Clear-HPiLOAHSData	Clear the AHS information from the AHS logs.
Clear-HPiLOEventLog	Clear the iLO event logs.
Clear-HPiLOIML	Clear the Integrated Management Logs.
Clear-HPiLOPowerOntime	Clears the virtual clock counter without power-cycling the server.
Disable-HPiLOERSIRSConnection	Disables Insight Remote Support functionality and un-registers the server.
Disable-HPiLOSecurityMessage	Disables the display of security text message in the iLO Login Banner.
Dismount-HPiLOVirtualMedia	Dismounts the Virtual Media image if one is mounted.
Enable-HPiLOERSIRSConnection	Connect to the Insight Remote Support server and register the server
Enable-HPiLOFIPS	Enables the Federal Information Processing Standard Enforce AES/3DES Encryption setting.
Enable-HPiLOSecurityMessage	Enables the security text message in the iLO Login Banner.
Find-HPiLO	Find list of iLO in a specified subnet.
Get-HPiLOAHSStatus	Gets the AHS status.
Get-HPiLOAssetTag	Gets the Asset tag.
Get-HPiLOCertificateSigningRequest	Gets the Certificate Signing Request status.
Get-HPiLODefaultLanguage	Gets the default language on iLO.
Get-HPiLODirectory	Gets the current directory configuration.
Get-HPiLODriveInfo	Gets the drive status of the server.
Get-HPiLOERSSetting	Gets the Integrated Remote Support setting.
Get-HPiLOEventLog	Gets the iLO event logs.
Get-HPiLOFan	Gets the Fan health details from the server.
Get-HPiLOFIPSStatus	Gets the current ‘Enforce AES/3DES Encryption’ status.
Get-HPiLOFirmwareInfo	Gets the firmware details for the iLO.
Get-HPiLOFirmwareVersion	Gets the iLO firmware version.
Get-HPiLOGlobalSetting	Gets the iLO global settings.
Get-HPiLOHealthSummary	Gets the health information summary of the host server.
Get-HPiLOHostAPO	Gets the current Automatic Power On and Power On Delay settings.
Get-HPiLOHostData	Gets the host data displayed on the Server Information page.
Get-HPiLOHostPower	Gets the power state of the server.
Get-HPiLOHostPowerMicroVersion	Gets the Power Micro Version number.
Get-HPiLOHostPowerSaver	Gets the state of the processor power regulator feature of the server.
Get-HPiLOHotKeyConfig	Gets hot keys available for use in remote console sessions.
Get-HPiLOIML	Gets the integrated management logs.
Get-HPiLOLanguage	Gets all languages on the iLO.
Get-HPiLOLicense	Gets the license types and keys.
Get-HPiLOMemoryInfo	Gets the memory details for the host server where the iLO is located.
Get-HPiLOModuleVersion	Gets the module details for the HPiLOCmdlets.
Get-HPiLONetworkSetting	Gets the current network settings.
Get-HPiLONICInfo	Gets the NIC details for the system NIC and the iLO NIC.
Get-HPiLOOAInfo	Gets the Onboard Administrator information from the enclosure where iLO is located.
Get-HPiLOOneTimeBootOrder	Gets the current state of the one-time boot.
Get-HPiLOPersistentBootOrder	Gets the current boot order.
Get-HPiLOPowerAlertThreshold	Gets the power alert threshold for the iLO devices.
Get-HPiLOPowerCap	Gets the power cap of the server.
Get-HPiLOPowerOnTime	Gets the virtual clock value, in minutes, since the server was last powered on.
Get-HPiLOPowerReading	Gets the power readings from the server power supply.
Get-HPiLOPowerSupply	Gets the power supply details for the host server where the iLO is located.
Get-HPiLOProcessor	Gets the processor details for the host server.
Get-HPiLOProfile	Gets all the Profile Descriptors and the data stored in them in the perm directory of the blobstore.
Get-HPiLOProfileApplyResult	Retrieves the result of the Invoke-HPiLOProfileApply cmdlet.
Get-HPiLORackSetting	Gets the rack settings for an iLO.
Get-HPiLOSecurityMessage	Gets the security message for the iLO login screen.
Get-HPiLOServerName	Gets the host server name used by iLO.
Get-HPiLOSNMPIMSetting	Gets the respective iLO SNMP IM settings.
Get-HPiLOSpatial	Gets the location information and system data with HP Asset Manager to obtain more precise and complete asset data.
Get-HPiLOSSOSetting	Gets the SSO Setting for the iLO.
Get-HPiLOStorageController	Gets the storage controller of the server.
Get-HPiLOTemperature	Gets the temperature health details of the server
Get-HPiLOUIDStatus	Gets the UID Status of the server.
Get-HPiLOUser	Gets the information for a local user.
Get-HPiLOUserInfo	Gets detailed information for all local users.
Get-HPiLOUserList	Gets a list of all local users.
Get-HPiLOVMStatus	Gets the Virtual Media drive status.
Get-HPiLOVRM	Gets the Voltage Regulator Module (VRM) health details from the server.
Import-HPiLOCertificate	Imports a signed certificate into iLO.
Import-HPiLOSSHKey	Imports an SSH Key and associated username into iLO.
Invoke-HPiLOProfileApply	Applies a deployment setting profile in iLO 4.
Invoke-HPiLOProfileDownload	Modifies a Profile Description, downloads a specific blob, and writes the blob to the blob store.
Mount-HPiLOVirtualMedia	Mounts the specified media image.
Remove-HPiLOProfile	Removes a deployment profile.
Remove-HPiLOSSORecord	Removes an HP SIM Trusted SSO Server record.
Remove-HPiLOUser	Removes an existing local user account.
Remove-HPiLOUserSSHKey	Removes any SSH keys associated with a particular UserLogin.
Reset-HPiLOAdministratorPassword	Resets the administrator password to a default value.
Reset-HPiLORIB	Resets the iLO.
Reset-HPiLOServer	Resets the host server on which the iLO is operating.
Set-HPiLOAHSStatus	Enables or disables AHS logging.
Set-HPiLOAssetTag	Sets or clears the asset tag.
Set-HPiLOBrownout	Turns the brownout recovery feature on or off.
Set-HPiLOComputerLockConfig	Configures the computer lock settings.
Set-HPiLODefaultLanguage	Sets the default language on iLO.
Set-HPiLODirectory	Modifies the directory settings on iLO.
Set-HPiLOFactoryDefault	Sets the Lights-Out device to factory default settings.
Set-HPiLOGlobalSetting	Modifies global settings of the host server.
Set-HPiLOHostAPO	Sets the automatic power-on and power-on-delay settings.
Set-HPiLOHostPower	Toggles the power on the host server.
Set-HPiLOHostPowerSaver	Sets the power regulator setting for the server processor.
Set-HPiLOHotKeyConfig	Configures the remote console hot key settings in iLO.
Set-HPiLOKerberosConfig	Configures the Kerberos authentication.
Set-HPiLOLicenseKey	Applies a license key for the Integrated Lights-Out Advanced Pack.
Set-HPiLOLockConfiguration	Enable the data-center configuration lock for iLO.
Set-HPiLONetworkSetting	Modifies the network settings of the host server where the iLO is located.
Set-HPiLOOneTimeBootOrder	Sets one time boot order.
Set-HPiLOPassword	Changes the password of a local user.
Set-HPiLOPersistentBootOrder	Sets the persistent boot order.
Set-HPiLOPowerAlertThreshold	Sets the power alert threshold value for the iLO.
Set-HPiLOPowerCap	Sets the power cap feature on the host server.
Set-HPiLORBSUPOSTIP	Configures the management processor RBSU to display the IP address during POST.
Set-HPiLOSchemalessDirectory	Modifies the current schemaless directory configuration on iLO.
Set-HpiLOServerName	Assigns the Server Name attribute shown in the user interface and host RBSU.
Set-HPiLOSharedNetworkPort	Configures Lights-Out device to pass network traffic on the shared host network port.
Set-HPiLOSNMPIMSetting	Modifies the respective iLO SNMP IM settings.
Set-HPiLOSSOSetting	Modifies the HP SSO settings for the iLO.
Set-HPiLOUIDStatus	Toggles the UID on the host server.
Set-HPiLOUser	Modifies an existing local user account present in the iLO.
Set-HPiLOVirtualPowerButton	Simulates the physical press of the power button, press and hold of the power button, coldboot and warm boot of the server.
Set-HPiLOVLAN	Configures the iLO Shared Network Port with a user defined VLAN ID.
Set-HPiLOVMPortSetting	Configures the virtual media port functionality for the iLO.
Set-HPiLOVMStatus	Sets the virtual media drive status.
Start-HPiLOERSAHSSubmission	Initiates Active Health System data submission to the Insight Remote Support server.
Start-HPiLOL2Collection	Initiates an L2 data collection submission to the Insight Remote Support server.
Start-HPiLOTestEvent	Initiates a test service event submission to the Insight Remote Support server.
Update-HPiLOFirmware	Update iLO firmware.
Update-HPiLOModuleVersion	Checks to determine if a newer version of the HPiLOCmdlets is available on the HP website for download.

May 15, 2014 3 comments

Datacenter Software Storage

Elitebook Challenge: Day 1 crash, recovery and comparing Elitebooks

by Philip Sellers May 14, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

unrecoverable_error

Sunday was my travel day, so I’m considering Monday as Day 1 full time on the Elitebook Folio 1040. It’s been a doozy of a day with the new Elitebook starting off with an unrecoverable software error from Windows. I cannot blame the hardware – its completely the software and perhaps my botched install of Windows 8.1 to blame. This morning, when I attempted to boot my Elitebook Folio 1040, Windows 8.1 game me an error during boot and auto-repair did not work. I suspect that maybe the drive encryption was to blame – I had not intended to enable drive encryption, but while setting up the fingerprint scanner I enabled it during my time in the airport yesterday. But certainly Windows 8.1 played a part here, so I will have to try it again with Windows 8.1 installed after I return home.

I don’t have a backup system with me this trip and its an incredibly crippling feeling to know that I’m without what I need to both work and attend the conference. But in case you’re not clued in by a new blog post, the Elitebook is working again. I was able to boot the system into HP Recovery and thanking my lucky stars for a recovery partition because I brought no physical media with me. In the end, I’m back to trusty and reliable Windows 7 from the HP image and I’ve already noticed some things working better than when I installed Windows 8.1.

After the reinstall, I was able to quickly recover things thanks to the cloud – Office 365 quickly reinstalled Office, Adobe Creative Cloud quickly reinstalled my Photoshop & Illustrator, OneDrive restored my personal files I needed for the trip and I had an external drive with my VM and VMware Player from their site. So, I’m back in business and so far, the laptop is running much better than under Windows 8.1 It is truly amazing how much difference a functional operating system [Windows 7] makes to getting work done.

Cloud to the rescue. And, I’m hearing a lot about cloud at Microsoft TechEd this week. The mantra is “Cloud First, Mobile First.” But that’s another post…

Comparing to Nerdblurt’s Elitebook 840

The rest of the week has gone without a hitch. The system loaded with Windows 7 is much more usable to me. Its battery life has been excellent. I have noticed with running a VM in VMware Player on the system, it does tend to drain the battery much more than using the laptop on its own. HP’s claims of 9 hours battery life have not quite held up at this point, but I do see myself getting a solid 4 or 5 from my testing – browsing, writing and using less-CPU intensive apps.

One of the things that I do like on this model is the inclusion of HP’s Client Security software. It allows for biometric, fingerprint password control in the system and it allows for drive encryption. I have not re-enabled the drive encryption during this trip, but the fingerprint scanner has been used a lot and its a handy feature – fully integrated into Windows login.

I mentioned the Forcepad in my first post about the Elitebook Folio 1040 – the issue with not accpeting gestures is also resolved with the rebuild from the factory image. Gestures and multitouch seem to work better, though the right click still seems to be an issue for me to learn. I can’t consistently get the system to right-click where I want. I will be watching HP’s Forcepad instructional video again.

I compared my eval Elitebook Folio 1040 to the Elitebook 840 that my good friend Luigi (aka NerdBlurt) was carrying this week. The 840 is a more traditional ultrabook. The 840 includes a touch screen display and the other obvious difference is that the 840 has both traditional trackpad and pointing stick with physical buttons. The Elitebook Folio 1040 definitely looks sleeker in the pointing department, without the extra physical buttons, but there were also no right-click problems on the 840 – just sayin’.

Other than the mouse differences, the Elitebook 840 and Elitebook Folio 1040 are pretty close cousins. The 840 comes in a much lower price point, but ships with a traditional HDD inside instead of the SSD storage in the Folio 1040. The Folio 1040 is about a half centimeter thinner than the 840 at its thickest and the 840 weighs more.

It was a happy run-in to get to compare the two during Microsoft TechEd when I met up with Luigi.

May 14, 2014 1 comment