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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.

When deploying HP Flex-10 switches in your racks, one of the things that is often overlooked is ensuring you have the correct upstream switch port configuration.

Your Flex-10 switches make up only one half of your network topology and need to be connected to upstream switches to complete the networking design. I’m going to use the example of Cisco upstream switches.

I’ve blogged previously on my ideas for a Flex-10 ESX design with simplicity and scalability, See Part 1 and Part 2

Ensuring your Flex-10 uplinks are connected to your upstream switch ports correctly is vital to ensure your Flex-10 infrastructure is always available and stable.

You may also have separate teams of people who look after your Flex-10 switches and your upstream Cisco switches as HP Flex-10 has often been sold as a networking technology which is easy enough to implement by server engineers and so may not be supported by your networking team. Always ensure your teams are talking to each other to fully understand the technology as finger pointing when things go wrong is the last thing you need!

HP has published a few documents to assist Cisco people in understanding Flex-10:

• HP Virtual Connect for the Cisco Administrator
• Do HP’s Virtual Connect modules work with Cisco’s new Nexus switches?
• HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 and Nexus vPC (virtual PortChannel) Configuration
  

Read more…

I’ve had confirmation from HP that the ESX 4.1 bnx2x 1.62.15.v41.2 driver is now officially supported with Flex-10. Although the supported driver is listed as 1.62.15.v41, the .2 at the end of the driver available for download was to facilitate a small change but has been fully tested and certified.
http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/dt_esx41_broadcom_netxtremeii_032311/ZHcqYnR0anBiZCpwcA==

My previous post was after confirmation from HP on 31st March saying this driver was not supported but a new version of the HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 NICs Solution Recipe which is dated 23 March and says released on the 27th March wasn’t available when I checked with HP or looked on their site (although HP’s site isn’t the easiest to find anything on!).

I’ve had confirmation that this driver supports DCC/SmartLink and also contains the heap memory increase.

If you are upgrading from the 1.60.50.v41.2 driver you will not need to remove the previous heap workaround step.

Unfortunately, VMWare’s Compatibility Guides have not been updated to reflect the latest version, they still say the 1.60.50.v4.1.2 driver is the supported version for HP Virtual Connect, so hopefully HP and VMware will address this soon.
http://www.vmware.com.tt/resources/compatibility/detail.php?device_cat=io&device_id=9404

This is a great step as the 1.62 driver versions for both ESX 4.1 and ESX 4.0 are now both available for deployment from Update Manager. I really hope this is the end of chasing blade Nic driver versions to work with Flex-10.

As usual, my Flex-10 ESX pre-requisites post has been updated.

VMware has released some new Broadcom bnx2x Nic Drivers which are used in HP blades for the HP NC532 Nics.

As with most bnx2x network card driver updates and HP Flex-10 there’s good news, bad news and unfortunately also the usual confusing news.

Let’s clear up the confusing news first.

There have been two new drivers released:

• ESX(i) 4.0 – 1.62.11.v40.1
• ESX(i) 4.1 – 1.62.15.v41.2

VMWare’s Compatibility Guides show which drivers are supported with which ESX versions:
http://www.vmware.com.tt/resources/compatibility/detail.php?device_cat=io&device_id=9404

Under Model Details there is now a note which says the 1.60.50.v4.1.2 driver version is the supported version for HP Virtual Connect, so it is saying the new version 1.62.15.v41.2 is NOT supported with HP Virtual Connect:

Read more…

Anyone who needs to build multiple ESX(i) hosts naturally looks to scripting to automate the process. Scripting allows for faster deployment once you have developed the script but equally important reduces human error. It’s far to easy to mistype a port group name, vlan number or IP address. Scripting removes this element of humen error and allows you to build ESX(i) hosts preditably and quickly.

Unfortunately there are just some things that PowerCLI cannot natively automate such as installing HP agents on ESX as this requires console / SSH access to the ESX host and running the install “locally”.

Hopefully hardware vendors will see the benefits of integration with VMware Update Manager and allow hardware monitoring agents to be installed and updated with Update Manager but until then we have to make another plan.

It is always painful to have developed a fantastic PowerCLI script to automate your build and at the end still have to manually SSH into your ESX host to install a hardware agent.

Read more…

ESX 4.1 update 1 was released recently which started the investigation again into the Broadcom bnx2x driver versions which are important in HP Blade installations.

Here’s a timeline of what drivers have been released:

• 13/07/2010 – ESX 4.1 Base install (Build 260247) installs the 1.54.1.v41.1-1 driver.
• 29/11/2010 – VMware release a bnx2x driver update available through Update Manager which updates the driver to 1.54.1.v41.1-2
• 29/11/2010 – VMware release a bnx2x driver update NOT available through Update Manager for driver version 1.60.50.v41.2
• 10/02/2011 – ESX 4.1 Update 1 released (Build 348481) which has the 1.54.1.v41.1-2 driver included
• 10/02/2011 – VMware release another bnx2x driver update available through Update Manager which installs a 1.54.1.v41.1-2 driver version.

Read more…

My Flex-10 ESX design with simplicity and scalability posts detail the configuration steps required to deploy ESX with Flex-10. There’s a lot of clicking around in the vSphere client that can be automated with PowerCLI.

The steps below will set up the ESX networking component as described in the design posts so can be incorporated into the rest of your PowerCLI build process.

Read more…

This post continues from Part 1 where the Flex-10 configuration was done.

ESX Networking

So now we have all the Flex-10 networking configured, its time to see how this works in ESX.

All VLANs are now being passed down all the uplinks, through the Flex-10 switches and onto the vm_trunk_1a and vm_trunk_2a Ethernet Networks.

What we need to do now is install ESX or ESXi and get them connected to the networks.

You would have defined a particular VLAN which you will be using for your physical host IP addressing.

A good idea is to plan out your IP addresses scheme for Service Console/Management Network, VMKernel and vMotion to have IP addresses that are consistent. This also allows some clever scripting possibilities.

Read more…

I’ve written quite a few posts about HP Flex-10 and some of the challenges and solutions to getting everything up and running.

I’ve also discussed my ideas about Flex-10 ESX design on the vSoup.net podcast so here it is…

If you are deploying Flex-10 make sure you have all the prerequisites in place:
http://www.wooditwork.com/2010/08/09/flex-10-esx-pre-requisites/

I also recently managed to find the manual page for the HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 10Gb Ethernet Module for c-Class BladeSystem on HP’s site which is a good reference launch page for the latest HP Virtual Connect Ethernet Cookbook and all other Flex-10 related documentation. Don’t you love trying to find things on HP’s site?
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DocumentIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&contentType=SupportManual&prodTypeId=3709945&prodSeriesId=3794423&docIndexId=64180

I do however think that HP is trying a little too hard to sell all the benefits of Flex-10 and is possibly sacrificing simplicity to show off all the features of Flex-10. They seem to want you to cram us much of Flex-10 into your deployment as possible when you should rather be streamlining the design to rather give you only what you need.

Read more…

Sometimes you need to delve into the innards of ESX to get information out that just isn’t available through the VMware SDK and so not directly available to PowerCLI.

If you’ve been doing any work recently with HP Flex-10 and its firmware requirements, you may need to find out the network card firmware version which is only available from within the ESX console by typing ethtool -i vmnic0

So, PowerCLI to the rescue, but actually using PowerCLI to call Plink.exe which is Putty’s command-line connection tool. You can use this same process to pull anything that you can get from the ESX console as long as you can parse the results of the command and find the information you need.

Read more…