I ran across this one a few weeks ago and I wanted to share it. If you are using the BNT (Nortel) switch modules in the IBM BladeCenters and booting iSCSI to various OS’s, you might run into problems using the default values on the Nortel switch. We were seeing our LUN’s intermittently not attach at boot and/or crash loading up. This happened with Windows, Linux, and VMWare. After some searching I came up with this link to turn OFF autonegotiation. This setting used to be off but in the latest BNT firmwares, the default value was changed to ON. If you switch it back to off, you are able to boot everything fine.
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Jun
05
2008
 
IBM Announces New Blade Intelligent Copper PassThru ModulePosted by: Aaron Delp in IBM BladesI saw this article over at xAnalysis and after some digging I came up with the new CPM Product Announcement . The big difference I can see is the new product no longer requires "octopus" cables. The announcement states the product will have 14 external network connections to match one:one the internal blade connections. I would love to see a picture on this sucker, I can’t believe they managed to get that many ports on a module. UPDATE: Simon was nice enough to leave a comment with a link to the product picture . That is an impressive use of real estate! UPDATE#2: I have learned the ICPM also supports Serial Over LAN (SOL) and KVM. Also, the ports will switch to 100MB speed instead of the previous requirement for 1GB.
Jun
05
2008
Mandatory Replacement of IBM BladeCenter OPM’sPosted by: Aaron Delp in Bugs, IBM BladesThis has been out a few weeks but it just came to my attention. IBM recently announced a Retain tip that the IBM BladeCenter Optical Passthru Module needs to be replaced because it will fail after 511 days of activity. This ECA (Engineering Change Announcement) is considered MANDATORY. Please see this link for more information and how to submit a form to have IBM replace the module: I have come to the conclusion that SAN Booting VMWare ESX is just a bad idea in production. By production, I mean in an environment where you have at least two redundant paths to your storage, and the machines are intended for 24/7 up time. I admit I am talking more about iSCSI than FC because I haven’t investigated FC as much. What do you think? I normally would post a bunch of links to support my theory and I will be happy to do so if there is interest (In other words, I can’t find them right now but I wanted to post this). Why would you not want to SAN Boot ESX? Isn’t that the rage? Yes, yes it is. If you SAN booted it, wouldn’t you be able to replicate the boot LUNs to another site and have all in one DR? Wouldn’t you get deduplication of the ESX LUN, snapshots, and all the other great things that make SANs the end all be all of storage? Yes, yes you would. So, it you are gaining all these great advantages, why not do it? One simple reason, local fail over. From what I have seen and heard, ESX just really doesn’t have the multi-path code in place today to handle having the connection to the boot LUN ripped out from under it. I would think the FC is more robust but I haven’t tested it. If you are doing this and have tested it, please let me know! Anybody get the Portal game reference? If you are a gamer and you’ve been under a rock, look it up and go play Portal! Best ending of a game ever. So, I’m here but I have simply been too busy with work and some personal issues to post. You probably won’t see anything until this weekend. I have some really good information on the IBM 3850/3950 and the HP DL580 regarding back plane bandwidth constraints and recommendations from some customer research. I have also been living in VMWare VDM (Virtual Desktop Manager) product for the last few weeks as well as some impressions about the VMWare Update Manager Product. More to come… But I’m still alive… I’m in a linky kind of mood tonight. Here are some articles I found interesting in the last week or so.
May
21
2008
Hardware Vendor Forum LinksPosted by: Aaron Delp in HP Blades, HP Insight Manager, HP Servers, IBM Blades, IBM Director, IBM Servers, NetApp, Q-Logic, VMWareIn 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! 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. I found this out while configuring some 10G Ethernet cards for a customer recently. Be careful who makes your 10G cards. It turns out the NetXen 10G card (OEMed to HP, IBM and Others) has a hard limitation of only being able to address 32GB of system memory in the box. If the system has more than 32GB of memory, the card will start dropping packets. My sources tell me there will not be a firmware fix for this at this time. To say this was a surprise to me is an understatement! I have never seen a card with a limitation based on memory before. IBM has pulled support for the card on the 3850 M2 model even though it is still a valid configuration in the configuration tools. I haven’t had a chance to check the DL580 but be careful if you are considering either of these boxes with the 10G card. Right now you will have to go 3rd party and your level of support may vary. One more thing I forgot. If you left a comment in the last few weeks and you don’t see it on the site, please contact me. I have been invaded by comment spam and I think everything is all fixed this morning. I should be caught up on both publishing and replying to comments. On the plus side, if you would like to know the site of a very persistent ring tone supplier, I’d be happy to pass along a site (with no guarantees of course!). Aaron So, after a small break, I am getting back into this again. A small bit of advice for everyone, if you are at a customer site on their guest wireless and decide on a whim that you would like to update to your Wordpress to the latest version; check to make sure they don’t have FTP blocked BEFORE you delete files and try to FTP the latest version. Doh! The site was down for about 12 hours until I could get home and get everything back in shape. I’ll be updating plug-ins and testing today. More posts will follow shortly. Thanks again for coming by! Sorry I haven’t posted the last few weeks. What can I say; I’m easily distracted by shiny objects. I made a switch from the Palm Treo 650 over to the HTC 6800 recently. This cool little geek toy has consumed my time for the last few weeks while I figure out everything about it. I have been loading programs and tweaking to my hearts content. My only advice to anyone considering this, the extended battery is a must!! Fun, Fun… Anybody else have a Windows Smart Phone? I’d love to hear your tricks, tips, and must have applications that you are using. Things should be returning to normal over the next few days. |
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