Virtualization, Storage, Community

This is a repost of a writeup that I orriginally did for DellTechCenter.com

This past Monday (2/27/2012), I had the opportunity to attend Dell’s San Francisco event, led by CEO Michael Dell, VPs Praveen Asanth and Forrest Norrod along with Sr. VP David Johnson, at which they unveiled several new offerings across their enterprise product line. While you can read all about the wonderful sales figures that Dell shared on other financially focused corners of the webosphere, I want to spend a few posts focusing on the event and products themselves and what stood out to me.

Part 1 - 12^th Generation PowerEdge

Dell’s 12G PowerEdge servers will ship with their 2^nd generation lifecycle controller which offers, along with their iDRAC 7, agentless management over the life cycle of the server. Further expanding on a feature that has been available beginning with their 11G servers back in 2009, the LifeCycle controller allows computers to be managed and monitored without taking precious CPU cycles away from the OS. When some installations require an extremely optimized operating environment, management agents, while essential, are essentially performance thieves.

Taking a look at the physical hardware itself, you will see that each server has a QR code printed on it, and when scanned, will take you directly to that specific server’s support page for quick access to warranty information, driver downloads and other critical information. My hope is that this info is migrated from the top of the server, where you’d have to pull the server out of the rack about 6 inches, to the already included ‘luggage’ tag that slides out on its own.

The PE R620, the virtualization workhorse, now has the ability to have up to 10 hard drives (up from 6). Another capability which will be in all R6 series and above servers is the option of front loaded, hot swappable, PCIe Flash Cache hard drives for an added tier of storage to go along with the traditional spinning disks. Dell is saying that it can hold up to 300% more Virtual Machines than the 11G servers. This is primarily due to CPU (upcoming Sandy Bridge), memory, network (10GbE) and hard drive advancements. Speaking of HDD configs, the brand new to the series R720XD comes with a max capacity of not only 24 2.5in drives in the front, but 2 extra 2.5in drives in the rear to separate out OS/App more easily.  One of the cooler configs is the field replaceable LOM (LAN on Motherboard). If you wanted to stick a generic 1Gb Broadcom in there today, but really wanted to upgrade to Intel or a Broadcom with iSCSI offload or all the way up to 10Gb in the future, no problem! Just swap that puppy out. Whereas with previous versions, you were either stuck until you bought a new unit, or went through the terrible pain of swapping out the entire motherboard.

The coolest new hardware was easily the industry’s first quarter height blade, the M420. Forrest Norrod (VP and GM of Server Platforms) seemingly pulled this thing out of nowhere from behind the podium, spoke about it for around 2 minutes and put it back.

I was a little stunned, especially that they didn’t spend more time touting this thing. It’s not going to be counted as microserver as Intel has defined it (single socket, 4 memory slots, etc.), that would be a disservice. This is a 2-socket, full networking fabric and management blade that will fit in to the current M1000e blade chassis. Which means you could cram 32 of these into a single chassis. Imagine, 32 dual socket, 8 core Sandy Bridge (educated guessing on the CPU architecture offer, but the model number doesn’t end in a 5, so I think AMD is out) blades in a 10U enclosure? S-E-X-Y!

A release date wasn’t officially set as Dell, along with HP, IBM and company, are most likely anxiously awaiting Intel to officially announce the availability of their Sandy Bridge CPU.

You can find more info on the new PowerEdge line the DellTechCenter.com wiki.

With at least one server coming up for refresh this year, I look forward to getting these in house to drool over, I mean, put into production.

Dell announced their acquisition of AppAssure today, a software based enterprise backup solution for physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. They feature both local (DAS, SAN, remote disk) and cloud based backup, replication and recovery.

This further supplants the idea of Dell as being a hardware company and continues them on their path to a more solutions and services focus. As some colleagues in the field and I were just talking (@plankers, @tscalzott) that hardware (especially storage/server/network) are becoming ubiquitous, the real value will be in features and software innovations.

Here's the press release from Dell:

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Failed sending update file: (NETW_FRMW_WIN_R299290.EXE) to iDRAC - Details: The update package (NETW_FRMW_WIN_R299290.EXE) is not supported via 1x1 update feature. Use the repository method to update this device. This error can also be seen if package is not named according to Dell naming standards.

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I racked my 2 new EqualLogic PS6100E SANs today, furthering my belief that storage is sexy.

Today, Dell released Update 1 to the 1.0.1 version of their Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter. The biggest highlight among the fixes and changes would be the added support of ESX5 (vCenter 5). If you're currently running the 1.0.1 plugin under a vCenter 5 environment (which 'works', just not in a supported kind of way), you'll need to unregister and re-register the Dell Management Plugin after upgrading (see the Release Notes for all issues/resolutions). 

One of the major changes from the original 1.0 to the 1.0.1 plug-in was the promise that updates to the appliance/software would come as an RPM patch and not tied to re-deploying another OVF. I'm glad to report that this worked wonderfully. You can find full instructions in the Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter User Guide (page 41), but here's the quick and dirty:

Ok, I've had the plug-in running for a few weeks and have gone through some of the primary functions of it (firmware updates, inventory, monitoring, warranty retrieval, create hardware profile for deployment)

I'm not going to go through the initial setup, that's been covered pretty well on DellTechCenter.com.

Here are the claimed major functionalities with my notes as far as day to day usage as well as some miscellaneous thoughts at the end.

Deep-level detail from Dell servers

The level of detail here is quite good; much deeper information and more clearly laid out than the basic 'Hardware' tab in vCenter. But what stands out to me is the efficiency of not having to rely on another tool, be it OpenManage, iDRAC, IT Assistant, etc. I spend a lot of time in vCenter and it's fantastic to not have to leave that for another program.

The amount of detail for hardware information is ridiculous. All of this information is available if you have the Enterprise iDRAC in your server, but to be able to get the serial number and manufacturing date of your RAM in the same place that you can check your warranty status is just beautiful.

Deploy BIOS and firmware updates within vCenter

This is a wizard based process that requires you to have a CIFS or NFS repository, which the initial setup walks you through for configuring. I've found it pretty straight forward, easy and quick. Well, the wizard is quick. While this feature is fantastic and works very well, the actual upgrade, however, takes quite a while. The server goes through multiple reboots throughout the process. After the updates are downloaded to the repository, the server is automatically put into Maintenance Mode and then reboots into an EFI environment to do the updates. After each update, the server reboots and re-enters the System Update environment to continue with the next update (firmware/bios). If you attempt to perform many updates at once (NIC firmware, BIOS, HD Firmware, etc.), be prepared to wait.

Build hardware and hypervisor profiles and deploy any combination of the two on bare-metal Dell PowerEdge™ servers without a preboot execution environment (PXE)

This is accomplished through the magic of the combination of the LifeCycle Controller and the iDRAC. While I've built the profile which seems very straight forward, I've yet to be able to test this (spare Gen11 PowerEdge servers are hard to come by, though if one were donated, I would not complain). Although I have a new server coming to replace an out of warranty cluster host that I was planing on testing on, I found this little nugget in the Admin Guide

The system needs to have a Virtual Disk for installation of the OS.

The Plug-in will not install the hypervisor to an internal SD card.

Bummer. This is the standard config for my cluster going forward. No Hard Disks. My great hope is that this is resolved in the next version. If not, this is a huge feature and potentially massive time saver that's not available to me.

Automatically perform Dell recommended vCenter actions based on Dell hardware alerts

The Plug-in adds a whole host of new Dell server specific alarms to vCenter. These range from power consumption to OS driver version monitoring. If something critical enough happens, say a single power supply in a dual power supply system dies, the Plug-in will automatically put the host in maintenance mode until the issue is fixed. This can theoretically save you from encountering an HA event, which, while cool, is never fun.

When I first installed the plug-in, I was immediately alerted to the fact that I was running on a quite old RAID controller driver. Handy.

Receive proactive renewal alerts from Dell before your warranty expires and access the Dell hardware warranty page online 

I've always been bad at doing this myself. It seems easy to track on my own, but we're all lazy in some areas, I guess this in one of mine. So, thanks, Dell, for enabling me to not have to come up with a better solution on my own :) I have yet to receive this because the server I'm testing on still has almost 1500 days of warranty left. But I see the link to click to renew it if I like, and its status is in the Overview page in the Dell Server Management tab.

Misc Thoughts and Issues

• Hardware Provisioning and Deployment
  • Unfortunately, v1.0.1 cannot deploy a hypervisor to an internal SD card. This is how we plan to move forward with our ESXi installs (including the R610 I just ordered)
• Pricing
  • Retail pricing is $299.00 for up to 3 hosts, $799.00 for up to 10, $1,799.00 for up to 50 and $2,999.00 for up to 1000 hosts
    • If you have 1000 hosts, you can probably afford this. It might be hard to sell $800 to my management to manage my 5 hosts. Essentially, we'd have to save about 25 hours of work to break even
    • I'm not asking for it to be free. It does too much to be free and is really bordering on what you can define as a plug-in. What I'd like to see is up to 3 for free (throw the SMBs a bone and gain market share in the process), $300 for 5 hosts, etc.

Dell unveiled an update to 2 of their EqualLogic PS series array platforms today along with their first sub-$10k array. The new PS6100 and PS4100 series arrays are a refresh of their PS6000 and PS4000 units. The new boxes are being touted as having up to a 67% improvement in I/O performance. 

Just got word Tuesday that I'll have the honor to be a delegate for Gestalt IT’s Tech Field Day 7 focusing on Datacenter IT Infrastructure. The event seeks to bring together some of the industries great thinkers, authors, bloggers, influencers and vendors to engage each other. You can read more about the Tech Field Day at their site to get an idea of what these guys are about. 

With our ever growing complexity within our virtualization environment, it's getting a bit un-wieldy to manage all the disparate pieces (physical servers, virtual servers, storage, network, etc.). Actually, managing the pieces is getting easier. It's managing the management pieces that's becoming difficult. I've got SANHQ and Group Manager for my SAN, vCenter/Veeam for my vSphere, OpenManage for my Dell servers, and on and on. Anything that cuts down on the number of management infrastructure components is a god send.

Enter the Dell™ Management Plug-In for VMware vCenter, which is billed as a way to "seamlessly manage both your physical and virtual infrastructure.". I've downloaded the trial (version 1.0.1) and will blog about my experience with it after I run it through some paces. The intial difference I see from the older one is that the older version's download (1.0.0.40) came with the Users Guide built in to the extract, but the new one did not. Had to go find it here along with the Quick Install Guide and the Release Notes.