Time to vote for VMworld 2011 sessions! Vote for the HP ones!

Time to vote for VMworld 2011 sessions is here. Like every year VMware has opened the process to vote for those sessions that you want to make their way to the conference. To be able to vote you need to have a vmworld.com account, if don’t have one the registering process is very easy. The voting process is open until May 18th.

I checked the sessions at VMworld site and all look very interesting, you should review the complete list and vote for the ones you like the most. However I also want to see a deep HP presence in VMworld since I firmly believe that HP has a lot to offer for VMware environments, also some of the most talented guys in the company have sent a bunch of damn good sessions for this VMworld, and because of that I compiled the following list which includes every session proposed by the HP folks. If you think like me please vote for their sessions.

SESSION	TITLE
2152	Storage Selection Techniques for Building a VMware Based Private Cloud
2258	Scale-Up Virtualization with High Availability ProLiant Servers
2271	VDI Without the Pain – VMware ThinApp and WES7
2290	Storage Best Practices and Performance Tuning
2291	Solving Storage Performance Problems with RESXTOP
2364	Business-Focused Reporting and Capacity Planning in Dynamic Virtual Environments
2503	Building and Managing Public and Private Cloud Services
2504	Navigating the Cloud Landscape
2507	Speed BladeSystem Infrastructure Deployment through Scripting
2769	You Know You Must Deduplicate Your vSphere Backups but Which Approach is Best for You?
2770	Data Protection Practices for Tier 1 Applications on VMware vSphere
2772	Best Practices for Achieving High Availability Across Multiple Sites with VMware
2773	Best Practices Deploying Storage for VMware View
2774	Supercharge Your VMware Deployment with VAAI and VAAI-enabled Storage Arrays
2812	Ensure Data Center Transformation and Cloud Success with Solution Blueprints
2826	Performance Considerations for VMware Storage —from RAID to VAAI
2828	Using vCenter Plug-ins to Troubleshoot and More Effectively Manage Storage
2837	Understanding Storage QoS and Policy-Based Storage with vSphere
2845	Virtualizing Tier 1 Applications –What Will it Take from Storage?
2913	DR Troubleshooting and Configuration Tips for Multi-site Storage Replication with Site Recovery Manager
2995	Delivering Uncompromised Virtualized Infrastructure Management from VMware vCenter Server
3094	How IT Is Becoming More than a Provider and Buyer of Technology Services
3099	Breakthroughs in Successful CV Deployment
3175	VMware Brick by Brick
3194	Modernizing Business Architecture with VMware Virtualization
1427	Battle of the Storage Experts
1623	Storage Superheavy Weight Smackdown 2011
2481	A Multi-Vendor Panel: “What Does Storage of the Future Look Like?”
2505	Cloud Advisor Panel : Lessons Learned from Real World Cloud Deployments
2832	How Chevron, Denver Health, and Diamond Resorts Converged Server and Storage Virtualization
3109	Desktop Virtualization – Talk to the Experts at HP and VMware

Finally I don’t want to finish this post without recommending to you a session from Julian Wood (@julian_wood):

3005 – Designing and Building a Simple and Scalable Virtual Infrastructure with HP Flex-10 and ESX(i)

Julian doesn’t work for HP but without any doubt he can be considered an expert in both VMware and Virtual Connect Flex-10 and this session has the honor to be the only Flex-10 related session. You can get more details about the session in his blog where he wrote a post about it.

Juanma.

HP Technology@Work On Tour 2011 – Madrid

The HP Technology@Work On Tour arrived yesterday to Madrid. This event has been a great opportunity for everyone to see the proposals from HP for Converged Infrastructure, Network Security and Datacenter Transformation.

The event is not as big as the HP Tech@Work from other years or the HP Discover that will be held in Las Vegas next June, instead HP in EMEA decided to bring a small show to several European cities like Paris, Madrid or Amsterdam and show there our stuff in all its greatness :-)

I didn’t planned in the beginning to go to HPTAW2011, I really had a lot of work to do this week, but suddenly I found on Monday that Hans Vredevoort (@hvredevoort) was coming to Madrid invited as Press and I really wanted to meet him. Hans is a great guy and I like to chat with him on Twitter, he’s also an MVP and the owner of Hyper-V.nu, one the top blogs about Microsoft Hyper-V.

We had the chance to share a couple of beers and have a fantastic conversation about the state of the industry, virtualization, blade servers, storage, HP 3PAR and HP products in general. We also made a small tour through the booth to see the demos and speak with some of my colleagues from HP  and from sponsors like Brocade, Microsoft and VMware. I want to make a special mention about my colleague Simon Leech from HP Networking who was very kind and talked with us about HP Tipping Point security products

Finally I had the opportunity to take a couple of pictures of the booth and the almighty Superdome2 :-D

I don’t want to finish my post without mentioning th people from the registering area, I wasn’t registered to the event but since I was an HP employee they were so kind to provide me with the proper accreditation that allowed to enter the booth.

Juanma.

Generate a Show All report in HP c-Class Blade Enclosures

One nice feature of the HP Onboard Administrator used to manage the c-Class Blade Enclosures is the posibility to generate a report in plain text format that contains the configuration of the enclosure and the whole inventory, including device bays, interconnect modules, MAC, WWNs, etc.

This report can be very useful for troubleshooting purposes and it’s for sure that if you have a problem with an enclosure and open a case to HP Support the Show All report will be amongst the first things you’ll be asked for.

Login into the enclosure Onboard Administrator administration interface. From the main screen go to Enclosure Settings -> Configuration Scripts.

You will see the interface to upload your customized scripts, a text box to point to an URL where the script is stored and two links named SHOW CONFIG and SHOW ALL.

Click the SHOW ALL link, a new window or tab will open and after a few seconds a report will appear.

Save it to your system and you are done. Now you can open the file with any text editor to look into the enclosure data.

Juanma.

Install ESXi from the Onboard Administrator

Installing an ESXi server, or any other operative system, using the c-Class Blade Enclosure Onboard Administrator and the server ILO is a very easy and straightforward process. The Onboard Administrator integrates with each blade server iLO, allowing pass-through authentication.

From the OA main screen go to Device Bays and select the blade server where you want to install the ESXi on, from there enter the iLO section.

In the iLO area of the server launch a console applet; as you can see in the below screenshot there are several options, choose the one the better suits your environment.

I personally choose Remote Console. When the console is up you’ll see a menu, open the Virtual Drives menu. Here you can map a physical drive from your PC/Laptop, an USB Key or an ISO image.

With the media mapped to the blade server reset the server from the Power Switch menu and launch the ESXi installation like in any other server. By default it boot from the DVD if not from the boot screen press F11 to launch the Boot Menu.

If everything goes as expected after a few minutes you will have a new ESXi server. Just remember to disconnect the virtual drive from the blade once the ESXi is installed or it will boot again from the ISO image after the reboot of the server.

Finally is important to point out that the install process can be launched simultaneously to several servers using the same ISO image.

Juanma.