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Check your diaries, the next London VMware User Group will be on the 17th May 2012 at the.

I have the lucky task of presenting again at one of the sessions. I’m going to be talking VDI with a presentation I’ve  called for fun “Help, My VDI Project is Hell!” I’ve found many VDI projects fall apart at some stage so I’m going to be dolling out some of my strategic musings on tackling the VDI minefield and then hopefully offer some practical & useful tips to help you make your project a success if you decide VDI is for you.

Even if you don’t want to hear me drone on again and VDI isn’t something you are interested in, there’s plenty more to find out during the day with presentations from 6 community members! I think this may be a London VMUG record which I’m very proud to be part of. I’m very keen on ensuring there’s plenty of U being put into VMUGs  along with all the other presentations from VMware and other vendors.

The presentations by users are:

• Darren Woollard: Over to You: Design Me a Highly Available Virtualised Infrastructure
• Chris Kranz: Flexpod: The Flexible Converged Infrastructure
• Ricky El-Qasem: Writing VMware Apps for Novice Programmers
• Neil Mills: The vMarket – Skills in Demand for the Next Five Years
• Steve Bryen: Management and Orch’n – What, Why & How

Read more…

HP has released two new firmware updates for its blade chassis, 3.50 and 3.55.

These were both released on the same day.

3.50 was released to support Gen 8 blades and is required before you insert any Gen 8 blades into your enclosure (along with having Virtual Connect 3.51). There are also a lot of other fixes. You will also need to update HP SIM to at least 6.3 to be able to discover OAs from 3.30 up.

3.55 was released on the same day as it seems testing missed some issues with authentication and EBIPA (great!) so I’m not sure why 3.50 was released at all. Confusingly the release notes and fixes for 3.55 include all the information from 3.50 so its not immediately obvious what the difference is.

So, no point really even looking at 3.50 but rather going straight for 3.55 which can be downloaded from:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=329290&prodSeriesId=3188465&swItem=MTX-1ee4cda0b03447c6974e4ca184&prodNameId=3188475&swEnvOID=4040&swLang=8&taskId=135&mode=4&idx=3

Enhancements/New Features
Read more…

HP has released a new version of the firmware for G7 blades which use an Emulex be2net Nic rather than the Broadcom bnx2x Nic used in G6 blades.
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=329290&prodSeriesId=5033632&swItem=co-103088-1&prodNameId=5033634&swEnvOID=54&swLang=8&taskId=135&mode=3

This is an offline update so will require you to boot from an .ISO to apply the firmware update.

New Features

1. Added support for the following operating systems: – RHEL 6.2

Resolved Issues from Firmware Version 4.0.360.15

1. A file level restore (FLR) request sent to a BE3 device while rebooting an HP UX guest VM image caused a timeout event.
2. When users tried to disable beaconing, they would receive a “Success” status even if beaconing had already been disabled.
3. The CN1100e device using VLAN did not pass traffic using “copy”. This failed only in full power mode. Traffic only passed in auxiliary mode.
4. The NC551 adapter failed to link with the 10Gb Pass-Thru module when using a 1Gb SFP transceiver.
5. The CN1000e device occasionally lost connection to network-attached storage (NAS) volumes when running an FCoE protocol under heavy load.
6. The FCoE port did not register as connected after repeated virtual connect (VC) module failovers.
7. The Flex NIC required changes to the DCC method to keep the link down until the switch explicitly sent link up.
8. A BL460c G7 array with P410i version 5.1x firmware would not boot from iSCSI if a logical drive was connected to it.

Known Issues

There are no known issues for this release.

Have a look at my updated post: HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 & VMware ESX(i) pre-requisites for information on all firmware & driver compatibility.