Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between
My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together
Category Archives: HP Blade
Confused by HP Flex10 Design for vSphere
Posted by on February 23, 2011
HP have a very clever 10Gb Ethernet technology called Flex10, which is an evolution of the previous Virtual Connect modules, it allows you to carve a single 10Gb NIC into multiple FlexNICs of varying capacities; this is especially useful if you are looking to deploy vSphere on HP blades. it can be tricky to visualise [...]
Matching an HP FlexNIC in ESXi to Chassis Flex10 Bay and Port Number at Install Time.
Posted by on May 28, 2010
When you are setting up an HP blade with ESXi you’ll want to ensure the administration interface is setup on the correct FlexNICs so you can add it to vCenter and continue the configuration – this can be confusing as there can be a large number of NICs presented. Up to 4 per Flex10 [...]
HP Blade iLo – it’s 2010 and disappointingly still using a 100Mb NIC?
Posted by on May 20, 2010
I wrote this original post over 2 years ago when I first had to build a set of HP blades in a c7000 chassis, having just taken delivery of another c7000 I had hoped that technology in the onboard administrator (OA) modules had progressed a bit further than it has. For some reason they still [...]
Resources for HP c-class blade and EVA Design for vSphere 4
Posted by on March 30, 2010
I am currently working on a design for a vSphere 4 platform on HP’s EVA SAN and c-class blade chassis. In order to provide flexible network connectivity we are leveraging the new Flex 10 Virtual Connect Modules as well as VC Fibre Channel modules to simplify administration Because finding things on the HP site [...]
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. [...]
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? [...]
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 [...]
VLAN Tagging with ESX and HP Blade Virtual Connect Modules
Posted by on February 3, 2008
Useful reference articles here, here and clarification from Scott here. Looking like I’ll be doing a lot with the HP C-Class Blade chassis this year, so this is useful.
