WoodITWork.com

I don’t normally find the need to rant too often, believing cool, calm and collected gets you through most issues but sometimes the time comes to shine the light on the things that bug you.

Today, that is HP’s Website

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Let’s start with Support & Drivers: http://www8.hp.com/us/en/support-drivers.html

Let’s try find the latest drivers for one of HP’s Blade Servers, the BL460, not an obscure product.

No luck…and I know this search hasn’t been working for months.

Read more…

Citrix has released a Beta of their next major XenServer version called “Project Boston”.
http://community.citrix.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=173115376

Some highlights from the new version release notes that I’ve spotted other than the expected performance enhancements are:
Read more…

VMworld 2011 is coming up and one of the great things about the conference is independent community members can also offer to present on any topic of interest.

I’ve put forward a presentation proposal Designing and Building a Simple and Scalable Virtual Infrastructure with HP Flex-10 and ESX(i) which is the ONLY HP Flex-10 related presentation proposal.

As there are many more presentation proposals than available slots, the options are put to a public vote so YOU get to decide what you want to see at VMWorld.

If HP Flex-10 and ESX(i) is of interest to you, please vote for my session. You will need a VMworld logon and click on the thumbs up icon against any sessions that interest you, hopefully mine!

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

Technical Level: Technical

Abstract: No one is downsizing their virtual infrastructure. Your virtual hosting environment is the one place in your IT department where you are not looking at making anything smaller. The benefits of virtualisation in managing costs by making better use of resources, improving availability by increased uptime and simplifying and standardising on your IT processes means you need to virtualise more and more. Using HP blades is a great foundation to build and expand your virtual infrastructure enabling you to create your own private or public cloud. HP Flex-10 delivers 10GbE to each blade and using VMware’s advanced converged networking capabilities allows you to provide IP Storage, VM Traffic, vMotion and FT to your infrastructure in a simple yet scalable way. Understanding and designing your infrastructure for HP Flex-10 can seem daunting, frustrating and confusing with too many options along with ever changing firmware and Nic driver version requirements. “Designing and building a simple and scalable virtual infrastructure with HP Flex-10 and ESX(i)” will show you how to configure your blade environment, what firmware versions you require and how to build your ESX(i) hosts with PowerCLI to take advantage of 10GbE converged networking.

HP has now released their Onboard Administrator (OA) 3.30 firmware after last week’s Flex-10 Firmware 3.18 release which had recommended the 3.30 OA although it hadn’t been released yet.
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=329290&prodSeriesId=3188465&swItem=MTX-bc11d40cf7b0465eacabefb649&prodNameId=3188475&swEnvOID=4040&swLang=8&taskId=135&mode=4&idx=2

Looks like it is a bug fix release as there are no enhancement or new features.

I’ve updated my Flex-10 ESX pre-requisites post for the OA 3.30 release although I’m not updating my recommendation for Flex-10 to 3.18 yet pending further reports and testing.