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Archive for June, 2011
HP Discover 2011 Expo Preview
Jun 7th
Here is a preview of the HP Discover 2011 Expo Floor. It shows a number of new HP storage products including HP EVA P6000, 3PAR, EcoPOD etc.
Please also view this: http://www.linkcounter.com/go.php?linkid=326371
How serious is HP taking Hyper-V Private Cloud?
Jun 3rd
As an invited blogger I will be at HP Discover 2011 next week (6-10 June) at the Venetian in Las Vegas. It is HP’s big Enterprise Business event that covers HP’s entire portfolio products, solutions and services. If you want to follow what is going on please follow the hashtag #HPDiscover
Again I will view the presentations, workshops and exhibitions through the eyes of an architect of private cloud infrastructure. I want to find out if HP has discovered there is more than one hypervisor ready for prime business. Of course I will interrogate HP people about their integration with Microsoft Virtualization, System Center, Hyper-V Private Cloud and Azure.
I have been working with HP (and previously Compaq) servers and storage since day one and I’m looking forward to their newest developments and announcements. We have built many server virtualization platforms based on HP ProLiant (BladeSystem) servers, HP EVA, HP LeftHand and HP MSA, now called P6000, P4000 and P2000. I intend to take a closer look at HP 3PAR (and wonder if this storage array gets a P#### number as well).
Let’s see how far HP has progressed with integrating HP and Microsoft technology. Hopefully it is not a VMware only story as it has been in the past, despite HP’s involvement in Hyper-V Private Cloud, the Fast Track program and the reference architecture built for this purpose. The first proof of real involvement was the Hyper-V Cloud HP built for Microsoft Management Summit 2011, the event I attended three months ago. Never thought I’d see Vegas again so quickly. I am not complaining.
Please also view this: http://www.linkcounter.com/go.php?linkid=326371
System Center User Group NL meeting: Best of MMS
Jun 2nd
On June 7th, 2011 the Dutch System Center User Group has scheduled a number of presentations of a variety of System Center products. The event is sponsored by HP and will be held at HP’s office in Amstelveen, Startbaan 16.
There will be three presentations on the newly announced System Center 2012 products during MMS2011 in Las Vegas in March.
So if you want a concise overview of what’s next with System Center, come to “Best of MMS”
12.00 – 12.45: Lunch
12.45 – 13.00: Welcome
13.00 – 14.15: Virtual Machine Manager 2012 (Mark Blok)
14.15 – 15.30: System Center Operations Manager 2012 (Oskar Landman)
15.30 – 15.45: Break
15.45 – 17.00: System Center Configuration Manager 2012 (Tom Klaver)
17.00: Drinks
If you want to attend this SCUG meeting?
Please register via: info@scug.nl (please mention your name and company name).
SCUG | Tuesday June 7th, 2011 | Start: 12.00 | HP, Startbaan 16 te Amstelveen
Windows 8 Metro UI and dreaming of swiping Hyper-V guests between cluster nodes or even clouds
Jun 2nd
On June 2nd Microsoft showed Windows 8 officially for the very first time. It will be the UI for the laptop, the desktop and the slate. I doubt we will see the Metro UI as an option on the server edition of Windows 8 but I thought of some possibilities like swiping a Hyper-V guest from one cluster node to another or to make it even more appealing swipe the guest from the private cloud and back. Just dreaming 
Here is the Windows 8 Preview and I am sure you will like what you see!
Just added another thought: “How about migrating a vSphere VM to Hyper-V vNext with just one swipe”
The speed of creating a Fixed Sized VHD
Jun 1st
Today I had to deliver a few 500GB Fixed Sized VHD’s in our Nobel Hyper-V Cloud Datacenter. The job had to be finished in a few hours involving provisioning the LUN, presenting them to the hosts, creating the VHD, adding the VHD to the Virtual Machines and prepare/format the disks for final use within the VM. Of course this had to be done without downtime to the users. Another very easy job but let me warn you: “It takes a bit of time!”
The VM’s involved were two Exchange 2010 DAG servers, the one in our Hilversum datacenter on an HP BL460G6 blade server connected to HP EVA enterprise grade storage with dozens of FC 450GB 15K disks and the other in the customer’s datacenter in Amsterdam, which serves as a DR site. The DR site has no HP EVA storage and there is no replication. We use a few single Hyper-V ProLiant ML370 servers with a bunch of local 1TB FATA storage. We backup to a local DPM2010 server in Hilversum and replicate that to a second DPM2010 server in Amsterdam. So recovery can be relatively fast.
How about speed?
Creating a 500GB fixed sized VHD on the EVA storage took only 49 minutes or almost 10 times faster.
Creating a 500GB fixed sized VHD on the Direct Attached Storage (DAS) on the recovery Hyper-V Server where the DR instance of the Exchange 2010 VM lived took a little over 8 hours.
Of course this is not a problem but very costly if the customer has to pay by the hour.
I was happy to have started the fixed disk creation the evening before so when I looked this morning both VM’s were ready and waiting to be used.
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