Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between
My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together
Category Archives: blade
Virtualization – the key to delivering "cloud based architecture" NOW.
Posted by on June 23, 2008
There is a lot of talk about delivering cloud or elastic computing platforms, a lot of CxO’s are taking this all in and nodding enthusiastically, they can see the benefits.. so make it happen!….yesterday. Moving your services to the cloud, isn’t always about giving your apps and data to Google, Amazon or Microsoft. You [...]
HP Rapid Deployment Pack – PXE Settings for Deploying Windows OS
Posted by on April 17, 2008
The followign screens show a working configuration from the RDP 3.80 PXE Configuration Manager Have had lots of problems with this deploying Windows OS’es and VMWare ESX 3.5 onto an HP c7000 Blade chassis, still not resolved all the problems, but this definitely works for deploying Windows! The documentation reads like you should always [...]
How does an HP Fibre Channel Virtual Connect Module Work?
Posted by on April 9, 2008
Techhead and I have spent a lot of time recently scratching our heads over how and where fibre channel SAN connections go in a c7000 blade chassis. If you don’t know, a FC-VC module looks like this, and you install them in redundant pairs in adjacent interconnect bays at the rear of the chassis. [...]
Cisco ASR is Virtual to the Core, all 40 of them!
Posted by on March 14, 2008
Interesting article here on how Cisco have made heavy use of virtualization within their new ASR series router platform, Linux underneath and 40 core CPUs! This type of approach does make me wonder if we will get to the stage of running traditional “network” and “storage” services as VM’s under a shared hypervisor with [...]
HP iLo Very Slow for Installing an OS
Posted by on February 27, 2008
A bit of a disappointment; we’re trying to do a WinPE 2.0 CD/DVD based installation for our Windows 2003/2008 standard blade servers in an HP c7000 enclosure. Installing from a .ISO image presented to the iLo via the virtual media applet is dog-slow (5-10 times slower than from a physical CD/DVD- why is this? [...]
Hot-Swap Datacentres
Posted by on February 11, 2008
There’s an interesting post over on Forrester research blog by James Staten. he’s talking some more about data centres in a container; making the data centre the FRU rather than a server or server components (Disk, PSU etc.). This isn’t a new idea but it I’m sure the economics of scale currently mean this [...]
VMWare ESX on IBM Blades
Posted by on February 5, 2008
I’ve worked with HP c-class stuff recently, but this is a good article on the IBM equivalent and the post looks a lot simpler to read than all the official IBM docs! In my book if you are virtualizing your infrastructure there is less of a religious argument on the underlying hardware – it’s [...]
New Blade Blog
Posted by on February 3, 2008
As Scott points out, Aaron has made a promising start with his new Blade focused blog* Welcome, Aaron – I’ve already found something useful on your site and may need to rethink one of my blade deployment plans slightly! *Edited 10/2/08 to update link for Aaron’s new URL
