Saturday, July 25, 2015

HP BL460 Blade Servers G7 vs G8 vs G9 Evaluation

HP has a solid chassis lineup for their blade servers, but if you don't purchase 100 blades all at once, you may be stuck with various Generations "G"s of their blades.

G7 - the LOM was fixed based on the base part number you started with. Then you add mezzanine cards of various models. The SD Chip to boot, is right on the side of the blade.

G8 - So, now you can CHOOSe the LOM module you want and swap it out if you want. You can add mezzanine cards, but WOW, the G7s don't fit in the G8s. A big disappointment to me when I had 8 extra 10GbE FlexFabric adapters from the G7s at 3K each and couldn't put them in the new G8s.

More coming

Friday, July 24, 2015

NetApp E-Series

I'm going to get an E5660 to play with soon. I want to see what it will be like as a target for backup. Looks like a pretty good bulk storage unit, 10GbE interface with iSCSI, or if you want, you can do 16Gbit FC. I'm going to stick with the 10GbE, because I have a lot of ports on the Cisco Nexus 5596s and the HP Blade chassis is connected to that as well.

HP has their 3Par 4200 series, but it was a lot more expensive than the E-Series.

Waiting on the stuff to come in, then I'll post more.

Linux Virtualization

OK, so they tell me I need to make a bunch of Linux desktops availbel to some people that want to get access to some Linux desktops and then actually use them. SOOOoooo.

I venture into Linux VDI.

Spice-space.org is my final resting place for this. The add-on packages run on a RedHat Enterprise virtualization host, and it looks like Fedora or CentOS will work as well. So I'm going to try all of these and see what works the best.

First I'll get RHEV-M running on a machine and go from there. Spice looks like it needs it's own server, I'll make that a VM on this host.

Hardware. I've got an old HP DL380-G6 hanging around with 72GB RAM, should do nicely. Need to find some HDs. I'll start with just some 300GB SAS Drives, but we will eventually try swapping that out with a 3 drive array of SSD drives to see what that does for our performance.

More to come, stay tuned. Comment if you're watching, so I know to update more often.

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Out of Topic - Captain Ed Freeman

Hi all,
I had to post this. I found about it from my dad. Thanks Dad. Made me happy to be an American.

You're a 19 year old kid. You are critically wounded and dying in the jungle somewhere in the Central Highlands of Viet Nam. It's November 11, 1967. LZ (landing zone) X-ray. Your unit is outnumbered 8-1 and the enemy fire is so intense from 100 yards away, that your CO (commanding officer) has ordered the MedEvac helicopters to stop coming in. You're lying there, listening to the enemy machine guns and you know you're not getting out. Your family is half way around the world, 12,000 miles away, and you'll never see them again. As the world starts to fade in and out, you know this is the day. Then - over the machine gun noise - you faintly hear that sound of a helicopter. You look up to see a Huey coming in. But.. It doesn't seem real because no MedEvac markings are on it. Captain Ed Freeman is coming in for you. He's not MedEvac so it's not his job, but he heard the radio call and decided he's flying his Huey down into the machine gun fire anyway. Even after the MedEvacs were ordered not to come. He's coming anyway. And he drops it in and sits there in the machine gun fire, as they load 3 of you at a time on board. Then he flies you up and out through the gunfire to the doctors & nurses & safety. And, he kept coming back!! 13 more times!! Until all the wounded were out. No one knew until the mission was over that the Captain had been hit 4 times in the legs and left arm. He took 29 of you and your buddies out that day. Some would not have made it without the Captain and his Huey.

Medal of Honor Recipient, Captain Ed Freeman, United States Air Force, died last Wednesday at the age of 70, in Boise, Idaho

May God Bless and Rest His Soul.

I bet you didn't hear about this hero's passing, but we've sure seen a whole bunch about the thugs Michael Brown & Trayvon Martin.

Read about him here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Freeman
And here: http://www.snopes.com/politics/military/freeman.asp
And here: http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/e/ed-freeman.htm#.VQHvsfzF8wo

Shame on you American Media!!!