In May 2010 HP introduced the new HP Storageworks IO Accelerator modules for HP Blade and ProLiant servers.

So what is this IO module. It is a mezzanine card that is available for HP C-class Blades or a PCI-e I/O card for HP ProLiant servers.

It is available in three different capacities: 80GB, 160GB and 320GB. But the MOST interesting is that it can deliver 100,000 IOPS.

Because it was not certified by VMware this IO Accelerator could not be used in ESX implementations. Until now! And today HP released drivers for VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1.

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At a client site we came upon a problem with Windows 2003 VM’s. They would get low network performance when we moved them to a newly formed ESX cluster consisting of HP 460c G6 blades. In some cases logging on to the server with a remote session took about 20 minutes.

As I mentioned this only occurred when we moved a VM to the new cluster, but also VM’s that where newly installed would get the same problem when running on the new cluster. As we are using Altiris to install and configure new VM’s a colleague decided to install a new VM by going through the steps manually which normally would be done by Altiris and found out that after the activation of a security template the performance dropped significantly.

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On a regular basis we have info sessions with our most important vendors.  Last week we had a session with HP to tell us more about virtualization in their hardware products. The session was especially targeted at Flex-10. Flex-10 is the way how HP breaks s a 2 x 10Gb Ethernet pipe into a flexible, easy to change, smaller Ethernet ports.

Why is this so important for us virtual friends? Of course it is a huge cost saver not only in hardware but also in management of the environment but the most important thing is that it opens up a lot of new virtual design opportunities.

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One of the coolest things is that we now can make a design for up to 4 blade chassis with each physical 16 server blades and let’s say 320 virtual servers where all the traffic between the servers never leaves the blade chassis. It is all handled with the blade chassis. Also all of the vSphere traffic like VMotion and service console can be handled within the chassis at 10Gb speeds.

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I have had several customers asking me for advice on what to do with new ESX hosts who should be joined into the VMware cluster, but after adding to the cluster problems with vMotion arose. It just didn’t work anymore because of some minor CPU differences.

One of the customers had bought the exact same HP DL380 model with same product number and revision with the same type of Intel CPUs inside. But unfortunately the stepping on the old CPUs is 6 and on the new ones its 10. The HP machines contain Xeon CPUs from Intel type 5450 3 Ghz stepping 6 (existing) and stepping 10 (new).

I asked them the following questions so I could give them advice on what to do next:

Question: How many new ESX hosts are you adding to the cluster?
Impact: If you are just adding 1 or 2 ESX hosts as extra capacity it is good to look into reforming the VMware cluster to an EVC cluster., because the more ESX hosts (up to 32) in a DRS cluster the better DRS can do its job. If you have more than 2 hosts to add to the cluster it can be a solution to build a dedicated cluster with the new ESX hosts.

Question: Do you need the new features added to the CPUs or do you just need more power in the VMware cluster?
Impact: If you look at the latest range of CPUs it can make a total difference of up to 25% speed, because of new added features.

Question: What are the plans for the future with the clusters and do you suspect significant growth?
Impact: If you suspect significant growth it can be useful to build up a new ESX cluster with new functionality but always weigh carefully the pros and the cons.

Question: Are the used servers and CPU’s capable of switching on the VT or AMD-V option and can the XD or NX bit be enabled in the BIOS? (Intel markets the feature as the XD bit, for eXecute Disable. AMD uses the name Enhanced Virus Protection.)
Impact: If the machine and the CPUs are capable, you can start using an VMware EVC cluster.

After answering the above questions I recommended some clients to build up an EVC cluster in vCenter Server, most answers I get after suggesting such a move are:

“uhhh build an EVC cluster, what’s that?”

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Today HP announced the release of the new ProLiant G6 server line.

After visiting an NDA session with HP on VMworld Europe 2009 a lot of new G6 ProLiant servers were shown. Nice new hardware build up for even better supporting virtualization in common.

All models are made energy efficient and ready for supporting virtualization. Also other things improved like support for the Flex-10 technology, Intel Xeon 5500 CPU’s (Nehalem) which can give 25% more power for virtual workloads and more and more memory banks to fill.

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While I was doing some research for different customers I needed to calculate the power consumption and how many racks I need. So I collected the links to different calculation models from various vendors.

The tools I found were the following:
Dell Data Center Capacity Planner (online)

HP Site Preparation tool

IBM BladeCenter and System x Power Configurator

If you know tools that do the same, but for another server vendor, please let us know. That way we can keep this list up to date.

Today me and AJ went to HP to get more information on HP c-Class blades. Last week we borrowed a C3000 enclosure with a c460 and a c685 blade from HP for our Centric/VMware seminar and we were very happy with it. I have to confess that prior to these blades I had very limited experience with blades. The only blades I worked with were HPBL20p blades and it wasn’t very plesant. They needed huge amount of power and cooling and connections were very limited.

But as I said the new HP blades certainly surprised us, so we asked HP if we could come over and get information and maybe a demo of the new HP blade systems and especially how we can use them in our virtualization/VMware projects. (more…)

Yesterday I wrote a blog on faulty HP ESXi 3.5 USB keys which cost me a lot of time troubleshooting. Today I received a link from a collegue (thnx Egbert) with more information on the subject.

Here HP Support document c01605187 which was released Nov 13th.

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At the same client site where we had the problems with VMware Update Manager and ESXi we are now struggling with HA. We can NOT get it to work and even WMware support can NOT get it to work either. We have been on the phone with VMware support for almost a week now and have tried various fixes but none of them work. We created a hosts-file to rule out DNS problems, we added advanced HA settings like ‘das.allowNetwork[n]‘ and ‘das.allowVmotionNetworks‘, we created new clusters, checked FT_HOST files and deleted all host from the cluster to build it again from scratch. All without positive results.

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