Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between
My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together
Category Archives: HP
VMWare Server Performance – A Practical Example
Posted by on April 19, 2008
The following screen dump is from an HP DL380G5 server that runs all the core infrastructure under VMWare Server (the free one) for a friend’s company which I admin sometimes. It is housed in some co-lo space and runs the average range of Windows servers used by a small but global business, Exchange SQL, [...]
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? [...]
Performance Update on Cheap ESX PC
Posted by on February 10, 2008
I’ve not done anything with my home ESX server this week as I’ve been busy with work; so this will be interesting – it’s been powered up all the time with all the VM’s spinning; but not doing very much. CPU Utilisation Memory Utilisation Disk Utilisation Whist running this set of VMs.. (the CPU [...]
Interesting Article on how DreamWorks are Speeding up Access for Animators
Posted by on February 6, 2008
I have a geeky secret; I used to be really into ray-tracing and 3D graphics not so much from an “art” point of view – although I do have an interest in that and computer modelling/visualisation checks a lot of boxes for me as I always wanted to be a civil engineer or architect [...]
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
