Aaron Delp’s BladeVault.info

In my day to day activities I depend a lot on the hardware vendor forums for the products I support.  I wanted to take a second to share all the links I have acquired.  Some will be obvious to everyone, but a few of them are pretty obscure.  Enjoy!

• Q-Logic Adapter Forums
• BNT (Nortel) IBM BladeCenter switch Forum
• VMWare Communities
• NetApp Communties
• HP BladeSystem Forum
• HP Insight Manager Forum
• HP Proliant Server Forum
• HP iLO Forum
• IBM Blade Forum
• IBM System x Server Forum
• IBM Director Forum

This one is a little late but I promised my buddy Simon over at vinf.net a link.  If you have an interest in FC Virtual Connect, you owe it to yourself to check out his article.  It is exceptionally well written and has an amazing amount of detail.

Link to the article

This article over at the Server Virtualization Blog got me thinking… Are Blades the next “Pizza Box” servers for ESX? By that I mean are Blades reaching the mainstream to the point that they are becoming a commodity? In my role as a pre-sales Engineer, I speak to many customers and you can predict what many of them want to talk about before we walk in the door, Blades and ESX.

Yes, we still move pizza boxes and many customers (usually the price sensitive ones) still love them. Now that the blade market has matured, we are seeing less and less of the pizza box attitude.

Let’s take that a step further, what are they buying? Some decide to go with the smaller form factor blades (IBM HS21 and HP BL460c) but a surprising number are going for the larger HP BL680c. The BL680c Blade is a four socket Intel Blade with a maximum of 128 GB of memory and plenty of expansion ports, especially using the quad port Ethernet expansion (remember to use the right model quad port card for ESX!!) For me, the small blade vs large blade decision always ends in the “it depends” answer.

You’ll notice I didn’t throw out an IBM 4 socket model. Not to throw IBM to far under the bus on this one but LS41 product just isn’t appealing to most customers right now. That is a discussion for another day.

What are you seeing? What are your thoughts?

This is an update to my previous articles here and here on this issue.

I now have confirmation from HP that the supported OS’s for iSCSI Boot on the Blades are RHEL (versions 4 & 5) and SUSE (versions 9 & 10). There is no Microsoft or VMWare support at this time.

In case you haven’t seen it, HP has a great power sizer for the BladeSystem that is available here. You will need an HP Passport ID to get into the site. The tool is very easy to use and configure. I like the ability to customize the utilization level to choose a value other than 100%. When the calculations are complete an idle amount is given as well as a utilization level.

There are three different types of reports the tool will produce: A printable version (that you can print to PDF), a Doc version, and an Xls version. Of the three different versions, the doc version is the most complete and looks the best for customer consumption.

One pet peeve though… HP, please remove the shopping list at the end with list prices!! Let’s face facts, list prices are useless to most people and this should be a technical report, not a sales pitch! Other than that, it is a very easy to use tool, check it out!

UPDATE: This article has been updated here.

This is a follow up to my previous article about HP Blades not booting iSCSI. I have learned that the HP Blades do boot (and are supported!) some Linux OS’s. Microsoft is still not supported and I don’t have the official word on VMWare yet. I should have an official list next week. As soon as I get it, I will post it here.

This one is more for my archive than anything else. We set up some Cisco 3020’s in an HP Blade System recently and after a few weeks at the customer site none of the switches were accessible over IP. The switch config didn’t change and everything was fine when the hardware was set up. The only thing out of the ordinary was the switch was given a hard coded IP address on fa0 as opposed to using EBIPA and providing a DHCP address.

Since the switch was in production we were wary to make any big changes. The fa0 port was listed as up/up and it shows the IP address. You could also ping the IP of the switch from the switch but you could not ping outside the switch. We had the same issue trying to connect from the OA into the switch. The simple fix was to shut/no shut the fa0 port on the switch. After this IP was reset and it was off and running!

Thanks to Kevin for this one!

In the near future I will be starting my first series of posts here at The Blade Blog in addition to the standard news postings. The number one area I receive questions about for both IBM and HP Blades is power. Anything from the types of plugs, how to set up the PDUs, how many Amps/Watts we’re going to draw, etc.

So, I was wondering what areas you would like to see more information in regards to power. I plan on covering both the HP and IBM Power Tools (did you know they had power tools?), PDUs and plugs, Amp and Watt calculations, power supply domains and failover scenarios, and other topics as they come up. I would love your feed back on the subject!

Some time ago Scott Lowe wrote up a great article on how to set up link state tracking for Cisco switches on both IBM and HP Blades.

I have set up a number of the switches lately and I wanted to add two more commands that I consider default settings on the switch to make your life easier before deployment. You will want to check with the network admin once you are on-site and probably modify them again to meet customer requirements.

vtp mode transparent
no service config (on the HP Cisco 3020 switches)

VTP Mode Transparent will place the switches into a mode where they will not participate in the VTP Domain to pass VLAN information to other Cisco switches in your organization. This allows you to “sandbox” the switch at the customer site and make sure everything plays well before you place the switch in the VTP domain. This prevents VTP problems if your VTP number is higher than the customer’s number, which would push your VTP settings out to the rest of the organization, providing they didn’t change the default VTP domain name. Sounds crazy, but it can happen.

No Service Config on the HP Blade Cisco switches will disable the “smart” feature in the switch where it will broadcast for a TFTP service to configure itself. If you don’t want/need this feature, simply enter this command in the config and it will go away. You will know you have this feature turned on if you are getting the following error in the switch logs and console on a regular basis:

%Error opening tftp://255.255.255.255/network-confg (Socket error)
%Error opening tftp://255.255.255.255/cisconet.cfg (Socket error)
%Error opening tftp://255.255.255.255/3620-confg (Socket error)
%Error opening tftp://255.255.255.255/3620.cfg (Socket error)

If you have a need for a quad port NIC on the HP c-Class Blades on ESX, make sure it is the NC325m and not the NC364m. The NC325m is certified for VMWare ESX and the NC364m isn’t. The NC325m is Broadcom based (I believe) and the NC364m is Intel based.

Link to the Quick specs for the cards and the VI3 Compat Guide:

• NC325m Quick Specs
• NC364m Quick Specs
• VI3 Compatibility Guides

A big thanks to Don at my company for helping out with this one!

UPDATE #2: This article has been updated here.

UPDATE: This article has been updated here.

I have been asked this question a number of times by customers here in the Triangle area. The new family of HP Blades, the c-Class Blades, do not iSCSI boot at this time. The IBM Blades will boot with the Q-Logic iSCSI expansion card but there is not an equivalent HP Product at this time. This fact can be a key differentiator in some accounts and is a good bit of knowledge to keep in your back pocket when positioning IBM vs. HP Blades.