Aaron Delp’s BladeVault

I have been playing around with HP’s new iSCSI card for the Blades, the QMH4062.  It is a very nice card but I noticed there are no boot drivers for Windows on the HP website.  There is a STOR driver and a MINI driver but no Boot or SCSI driver.

So, off to the Q-Logic website and bingo…  Download the SCSI drivers, copy them to a floppy, hit F6 during the Windows install, and I’m off and booting with iSCSI.  Here’s the link if you need it:

Q-Logic 4062 Driver page for Windows 2003 Server

Every once and awhile an iLO2 Remote Control session will get "stuck".  By this I mean when you try to connect, it will say that there is a session already in progress.  A reboot of the iLO2 will clear this state.  To restart the iLO2, follow these steps.

• From the Web Administration page for the iLO2, you should be on the System Status tab by default
• Click Diagnostics on the left hand side
• On the bottom of this page is a Reset button for the iLO2

Has anybody else ever seen really bad mouse lag and synchronization from the iLO2 Remote Control on an HP Blade?  I have seen this a few times and the solution has always been to change a setting in the iLO2 settings for high performance mouse.  It is normally set to auto-detect.  I have found that changing it to enabled will usually correct this problem.  Here are the steps to change this setting.

• From the Web Administration page for the iLO2, Click the Remote Console tab on the top
• Click Settings
• The first entry is High Performance Mouse, change this from Automatic to Enabled

This is more of a brain dump than an informative article.  I recently had to put an IP address on an HP Blade GbE2c switch for a lab setup.  The switch does BootP by default but we didn’t have this available and only one uplink out of the switch.  It has been a few years since I worked on one but the last time I did this the switch would not accept an EBIPA address.  So, here are the config commands:

• /cfg/sys/bootp to access the bootp settings, bootp must be disabled to apply an ip address
• d to disable bootp
• /cfg/l3/if (interface number) - I used 21 in this case.  19 is the interface to the Onboard Administrator (OA)
• enter the ip, mask, etc
• ena to enable the port
• apply to save to running config
• save to save to flash memory

I noticed a bunch of traffic today from www.hypervoria.com .  Steven’s posted a link to my article on Hyper-V .  Thank you Steven!  Hypervoria is a really nice blog on Hyper-V.  Check it out.

Something interesting happened to my plane on the way back from the IBM Technical Conference.  I flew back on a new 757 with an “entertainment system” in the headrest.  In the middle of the video about passenger safety, the video froze and after about a mintue I saw the following:

It’s a blurry picture from my phone (yes, it was supposed to be off but I couldn’t resist pulling it out and turning it on to capture this).  The picture is the system rebooting itself.  The seats use Red hat Linux.  I thought it was hysterical.  Everyone around me was just looking around, confused what all this “stuff” was on their screen.  In a few minutes, everything was fine.

I played around with it and I found some features I liked.  The music was free and had a great selection.  The video is another story.  I’m sorry but I’m not swiping my credit card to play a movie or a TV show.  I know the airlines are desperate for cash but come on…

I dropped .info from the name of the site because I recently purchased bladevault.com and bladevault.net.  They aren’t set up yet, but I will configure them shortly.  For now, I will just set them up to DNS forward over here.  So, there will be 4 ways to get to my site: blog.aarondelp.com, www.bladevault.com, www.bladevault.net, and www.bladevault.info.

I will also set up e-mail alias’ shortly for the new domains so you can send me e-mail at the .com and .net domains.  When that is complete I will update the About Aaron Delp page with updated e-mail link(s).

Just a quick heads up that I updated my previous post, Citrix XenServer for the ESX Engineer, based on feedback from the Citrix team.  If anybody has any additional comments or concerns, please post them over there.  Thank you again for the interest and keeping me honest.

Hey all - It appears my Hyper-V and XenServer write-ups caused a bit of traffic and comments.  First off, it is awesome!!!  Thank you!!!  I want to make sure everything that is presented here is accurate and I am coming up to speed on those two products.

But, I just flew back from the IBM Technical Conference in San Deigo on the red eye last night.  I just woke up and it’s now family time for a bit.  I will respond to all comments and e-mails shortly and I will make any corrections and clarifications this weekend.  Again, thank you for your time and attention!!  Now, off to play with my little girls who haven’t seen me since Sunday!