VMware on HP BladeSystem with Virtual Connect and EVA

HP's Customer Focussed Testing team have just published a great white paper on best practices for running VMware on HP BladeSystem with Virtual Connect and EVA. This is one of our biggest selling enterprise solution stacks right now and this paper tells you, our customers the best way to size it, set it all up and manage it to maximise your investment.

This white paper contains a set of best practices to deploy VMware ESX 3.5 using HP BladeSystem c-Class ProLiant Server Blades and HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) storage, using HP Virtual Connect. The best practices included in this paper will enable customers to realise the benefits of using the virtualisation capabilities of VMware in conjunction with HP server blades, HP Virtual Connect, and EVA, with emphasis on how to combine their functionalities to complement each other.

This paper addresses the following fundamental deployment issues:

• How to configure and deploy a set of virtual machines on the server blade using VMware ESX Server 3.5
• How to deploy HP Virtual Connect technology in a blade enclosure
• How to configure and deploy VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) on an EVA
• How to effectively manage the overall environment, using a combination of HP management tools and VMware vCenter Server
• How to configure and utilize the advanced high-availability features from VMware (VMware High Availability [HA], VMware VMotion™, and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler [DRS]) to deliver and sustain a high-availability infrastructure.

Using the methods and best practices described in this paper will facilitate both the productive planning and the timely deployment of a fully operational VMware ESX Server 3.5 deployment using a combination of HP BladeSystem c-Class ProLiant Server Blades connected to an EVA array via HP Virtual Connect technology.

The guidelines and best practices that follow can ensure the following:

• Proper configuration and deployment of the entire environment, including the VMware environment, HP server blades, the EVA, and HP Virtual Connect technology
• Predictable performance characteristics
• Ease of operation, including the effective use of the advanced HA features

Download Whitepaper Here

The is paper along with many other solution specific best practice documents on Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, SAP and VMware are downloadable from the CFT website on hp.com <<click here>>

About CFT?

Working directly with our customers, HP’s Customer Focused Testing (CFT) team creates innovative solutions that address the operational requirement challenges our customers worry about every day:

• Sizing and configuring your environment to optimize your infrastructure
• Backing up and recovering valuable business information
• Creating a highly available infrastructure

Carefully planned and implemented, our Customer Focused Testing Solutions incorporate HP storage, server and software products to bring you:

• Reduced implementation cost and time
• Predictable results through documented best practices
• Optimized performance across all solution components
• Best possible return on investment
• Increased availability
• Reduced risk

What's New for 2009?

Happy New Year to you all. I hope you all had a relaxing and enjoyable Christmas and the batteries are fully charged up for the new year! It promises to be a fairly hectic one in the ProLiant and BladeSystem space where we will continue enabling our customers to do more with less. Technologies like BladeSystem, Dynamic Power Management, Virtual Connect, Insight Software together with virtualisation will be key enablers to help our customers deliver a best in class IT service to their business while at the same time reducing costs.

300GB SFF Drive Now Available
If you didn't hear before the Christmas holidays - we now have the long awaited 300GB Small Form Factor Hard Drive delivering high capacity and performance at the lowest energy requirement and greatest reliability.

Here are a few quick facts that our customers will care about

1. This drive provides higher performance than 3.5-inch 15K drives and consumes about 50% less power.
2. This drive is 70% smaller than 3.5-inch drives and reduces cooling costs through tighter packing and better airflow in the cabinet.
3. A 2U SFF 10K SAS solution provides 40% more IOPS and 59% more IOPS/Watt than a 3U LFF 15K solution
4. HP Enterprise drives provide maximum reliability and performance for heavy IO environments and near 100% workloads.

Check out my earlier Blog on Small Form Factor Vs Large Form Factor Drives for more of the benefits of SFF. <<Click Here>>

Server Technology Papers
I have a lot of positive feedback from you on the Technology Papers that our ProLiant and BladeSystem engineering teams publish. The latest edition is now available for download <<here>> and includes such topics as Solid State Drives, Command Line and scripting options for ProLiant Management, as well as an interview with a lead engineer on our AMD based ProLiants. If you like these then the full archive is available <<here>>. Finally if you'd like to search for a particular topic then download this PDF <<file>>.

I liked this one which I just read on iSCSI technology in our ProLiant servers <<click here>>.

These technology publications are now also being made available via Podcasts so if you don't like reading then you can listen i.e. you now have no excuse!!

I will most likely have another post pretty soon as we ramp up some new product announcements which will be keeping me busy - stay tuned and if you find this blog useful you can subscribe by simply entering your eMail address in the subscription box located in the top right hand corner of the blog home page! Until next time...