Last week there was a leak regarding HP ProLiant Gen8 servers, but today the entire cat is officially out of the bag. The cat really should be a tiger, the changes are so significant. G7 servers were fairly incremental improvements over G6, with only a few minor changes. Gen8 appears to me...
One of the challenges with managing a lot of virtualized HP servers is firmware updates. Unlike Windows or Linux hosts where you can perform relatively simple on-line updates, ESX(i) hosts must be done offline. Traditionally you boot from the HP Firmware DVD and apply the updates. The update process was...
Last week HP announced their new 3PAR P10000 array, which is the next generation virtualization array. It features a number of enhancements over their previous generation, released when 3PAR was still independent. Today at VMware vmworld HP had an unveiling of the P10000 and former 3PAR CEO David Scott was...
One of the new features of vSphere 5.0 is a VMware VSA, or virtual storage appliance. VSAs are nothing new, as HP and FalconStor have offered VSAs for vSphere for a number of years. VSAs work by using DAS (direct attached storage, e.g. SAS or SATA) and turn it into shared storage...
In my previous blog I discussed how the VMware 4.1 VAAI 'write same' implementation in a 3PAR T400 showed a dramatic 20x increase in performance, creating an eager zeroed thick VMDK at 10GB/sec (yes, GigaBYTES a second). The other major SCSI primitive that VAAI 4.1 leverages is XCOPY (SCSI opcode 0x83). What this...
So in my previous blog entry I wrote about how I upgraded a 3PAR T400 to support the new VMware vSphere 4.1 VAAI extensions. I did some quick tests just to confirm the array was responding to the three new SCSI primitives, and all was a go. But to better...
For those of you using vSphere 4.1, one of the cool new features is VAAI support. What is VAAI? VAAI is a deep level of integration between select storage arrays and the ESX kernel. The three VAAI functions released in 4.1 are:•Atomic Test & Set (ATS), which is used during...
If you aren't familiar with thin provisioning, it's a technology being widely adopted by storage vendors that only allocates back-end disk space to a LUN when data is written. For example, if you present a 500GB LUN to a server and only write 100GB of data, the array only uses...
With leaks starting to grow about next release of ESX(i), v4.1 is now out the door! It is a big upgrade and include a lot of new goodies for people. Below is a small sampling of the changes in 4.1:- VMware now made it obvious ESX is dying and everyone...
For those of you using ESXi 4.0 on HP servers, be sure to check out their new CIM providers. The CIM providers communicate hardware health status to the ESXi host and in turn, to vCenter. You can then configure alerts in vCenter to warn you of hardware health problems.The new...