Hp on The IT Hollow

HP v1910-24G Switch Review

Tue, 03 Jun 2014 13:27:17 +0000

When my Cisco 3750 finally died, I was bummed out but looking for a replacement. No sense in crying about my loss, or trying to decide IF I’m going to replace my switch since, my whole lab would be kind of useless without it.

My requirements for a new switch were pretty simple.

Layer 3 Routing Capabilities
24 Gigabit Ports or better
Cheap

The HP v1910-24G (JE006A) seemed to meet my requirements so I ordered it from Amazon when I saw that it was under $300. I needed to get it in my lab fast, so I quickly made the purchase but I’ll admit I was skeptical. Timothy Carr eased my mind a bit when he tweeted me.

HP v1910-24G CLI Goody

Tue, 27 May 2014 13:31:03 +0000

theITHollow.com lab suffered an outage to the core switch a few weeks ago (an aging Cisco 3750) and I was looking for a replacement that wouldn’t break the bank. Luckily I found the HP v1910-24G (JE006A) to be more than adequate. One of my main gripes with this switch was that the Command Line Interface was very limited. See for yourself. While the cli out of the box is nice, and I would say necessary, there isn’t a lot that can be done with it. For basic configuration tasks, you’ll be stuck with the Web GUI. But after digging through some HP discussion boards I found out that you can enable the Comware operating system commands.

HP 9470m Laptop Review

Mon, 05 May 2014 14:54:18 +0000

I recently purchased the HP 9470m EliteBook and wanted to give it a quick review.

The Good

The laptop has a pretty slim design as you would expect from an EliteBook. Be aware however that this is not as slim as a Mac b ook Air, or the Samsung Series 9 laptops. The good news though is that you don’t need to use a dongle just to plug in an Ethernet cable. The same goes for having a VGA output which I often use for presentations. It can be a pain to hunt down a dongle to connect to a wired network, or a projector so I give this Elitebook points for that.

Add SSDs to HP Microserver

Wed, 11 Dec 2013 15:21:26 +0000

My brand new shiny HP Microserver arrived in the mail and I was excited to try it out. I had four 480GB OCZ SSDs to add to this baby server and wanted to get it up and running. Unfortunately, the HP Microserver is built for 3.5 inch drives. Luckily I found great solution.

Newer Technology AdaptaDrive 2.5" to 3.5" Drive Converter Bracket.

Attach your 2.5 inch SSD to this bracket, then attach the bracket to the HP MicroServer Drive Trays and you’re good to go.

HP StoreOnce VSA

Tue, 16 Jul 2013 14:08:08 +0000

HP announced a new virtual storage appliance (VSA) recently at their annual HP Discover conference. This is a virtual appliance based on the StoreOnce line (formerly known as D2D) of hardware appliances that HP has sold for a long time. These appliances have the catalyst software which allows for deduplication of all your backup data, hence the term StoreOnce.

These devices have allowed administrators to switch from the older tape based backups to a virtual tape library (VTL) or a NAS type backup solution. It has replication options in it which allow for deduplicated data to be migrated or copied without re-hydrating the backups and wasting valuable bandwidth. It also allows for federated backups and when matched with HP Data Protector 8 (also newly released) can throttle bandwidth during backup operations in order to prevent production slow downs.

SDR News Interview for HP Discover

Fri, 21 Jun 2013 14:28:40 +0000

I was recently interviewed by Andrew McCaskey from SDR News about the HP Discover conference. The interview is below

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=IUM-sDiHD18

New HP Business Desktops

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 14:26:28 +0000

Only a few years removed from when HP announced they were ditching the workstation part of their product line, they’ve announced a new set of desktops this week.

The EliteOne 800 G1

The EliteOne 800 G1 is an all in one solution for companies that include the newer Intel 8 Series Q85 chipset which includes the Intel vPro technology. I haven’t been able to get my hands on playing with this yet, but essentially it uses the trusted execution environment in order to allow access to the PC even if it’s powered off, or if it has a virus. Perhaps this doesn’t seem like a big deal to end users, but the IT group that has to support these devices will certainly take notice. I liken it to having an iLO processor on every desktop so that troubleshooting can be done remotely by support. This will even allow off site or third party support to gain access in order to troubleshoot issues.

HP Proliant MicroServer Gen8

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 13:27:10 +0000

HP has a new MicroServer out that would be perfect for the anyone who is looking for a solid home lab server. The Microserver G7 was a fairly popular server for home computing enthusiasts and HP decided to add upon that line.

The original reason for this server was for small businesses that wanted a small but stable server with features such as integrated Lights Out (iLO) but as it so happens, this line was pretty useful for those bloggers and certification junkies that wanted to take some HP Servers home with them.

New HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 Announced

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 18:25:27 +0000

HP officially announced the new HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 today to some oohs and ahhs at HP Discover.

The new 3PAR is an all flash array that can be utilized for small, medium or large business needs. HP is touting that some of their competitors are having difficulty with the flash hurdle because their systems were optimized for spinning disks. And other competitors who designed their arrays specifically with flash in mind from the ground up are not proven arrays from a reliability standpoint.

HP Virtual Connect Throughput

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 13:54:15 +0000

I want to address a concern that many HP Virtual Connect customers have had about monitoring their Blade Chassis. A question I’ve received was “How do I know if I have sufficient uplinks for my traffic?”

Depending on the size of the organization and their familiarity with their networking equipment, they could be monitoring the available metrics on their switches. If they are not necessarily that network savvy or don’t have the proper monitoring tools in place, they can use the throughput statistics tools within Virtual Connect. These tools only give a simplistic view to the amount of traffic that is going across your uplinks, and doesn’t show the traffic going out each blade but it does get you some great high level information.

HP Virtual Connect MAC Addresses and WWNs

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 14:32:34 +0000

One of the benefits of using HP Virtual Connect in C-class blade Chassis is the ability to have MAC Addresses and WWNs set on a server bay as opposed to the physical server. I’m sure you’re aware that each device that has a network card has a Media Access Control (MAC) address which is a burned in identifier that makes that NIC unique.

HP decided that it might be nice to control those MAC Addresses in their blade chassis. Before you setup any server profiles, you have the option to choose “Virtual Connect Assigned MAC Addresses”. These are addresses that are assigned to each server bay so that no matter what blade is put into the bay, the MAC addresses will stay the same. You might find this very useful in the case of a failed blade. If you receive a new blade from HP and throw it into the same bay, it will retain all of the same MAC Addresses and thus look the same to your switches.

Virtual Simulators

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 14:02:16 +0000

If you’re an engineer and you’re trying to get more experience with a variety of different storage devices, you might find yourself in a bit of a pickle. Most customers settle one one or two storage vendors and that’s it. So if you work for one of these companies you can learn EMC or Netapp, etc. I highly doubt your company would be interested in purchases a few different types of storage devices so that you can learn them as they are quite expensive.

HP Performance Viewer

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 14:42:54 +0000

I decided to check out the new HP Performance Viewer and found it to be pretty useful. The appliance comes as an OVF so it’s great for importing into your vSphere environment. Once it’s installed you can go to the management URL and all you have to do is provide the name of the vCenter and login credentials. That’s all for the configuration!

At this point I’d give the appliance some time to gather statistics, but if you just can’t wait I’ll give you some of the details from my install.

HP Insight Remote Support

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 14:14:17 +0000

I used to love the fact that with my old Netapp FAS2040 that I’d get a phone call about replacing a failed drive almost before I received the alert about the drive in the first place. Phone home seemed genius to me and as it turns out, Hewlett Packard has this capability for their equipment.

Full disclosure: As many of you know, I currently work for an HP Partner so my advice may be a bit biased. I can tell you that I wouldn’t put a product on this site which I didn’t like so please don’t think that I’m just trying to push HP products. You may see more HP related articles from me, only because I encounter them more frequently than others.

HP 3PAR for midrange business

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 16:44:06 +0000

HP Enterprise class storage has just entered the mid range market. Today HP announced the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 class which includes two devices; the HP 3PAR 7200 and the HP 3PAR 7400. The 7200 starts at $25k for the 2U device and the 7400 (seen below) is less than $40K for a 4U device.

I’m very excited about this announcement because now HP has a storage device with the features that everybody wants and it’s now affordable for a smaller sized organization. HP has seemingly targeted one of it’s own devices with this announcement (the HP EVA) since it has been very popular with the mid-range business. They’ve even included some tools to migrate data from the EVA to the new 3PAR. I seriously doubt that the EVA will entirely go away, but the new big brother is going to steal some of their thunder.

HP Insight Control for vCenter

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 15:15:10 +0000

I recently tried out the HP Insight Control plugin for vCenter and was very pleased about the added functionality that was provided in my vSphere client.

http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/integration.html

This plugin gives you additional control of your HP servers and storage that are being used by your vSphere environment. Like other storage vendors, the install will configure your VASA plugin, and will also allow you to do things such as create datastores and snapshots on the storage array from the vSphere Client.

HP Storage Comparisons (Sept. 2012)

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 12:00:26 +0000

I have been recently thrown into the world of HP Storage, and have been trying to learn all of the storage techniques that are in the HP product line. I noticed that I couldn’t find anything that really did a compare and contrast of each of the products so I started to put one together. Anything I couldn’t understand, I asked a great guy named Calvin Zito (@hpstorageguy) to give me a hand with. He was more than gracious so follow him on Twitter.

HP Virtual Connect Networks

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 07:00:46 +0000

I gave an overview of how HP blades are mapped to Virtual Connect Interconnect Modules in my last post. /2012/08/09/hp-virtual-connect-basics This post focus more on understanding the networks created through HP Virtual Connect Manager.

In the last post I described out blade NICs map to the Interconnect Bays in the back of an HP C7000 Chassis using the downlinks. Now let’s talk about how those NICs can get added to a specific Network. HP calls these networks inside of a c7000 chassis “vNets”.

HP Virtual Connect Basics

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 01:00:15 +0000

HP Virtual Connect is a great way to handle network setup for an HP Blade Chassis. When I first started with Virtual Connect it was very confusing for me to understand where everything was, and how the blades connected to the interconnect bays. This really is fairly simple, but might be confusing to anyone that’s new to this technology. Hopefully this post will give newcomers the tools they need to get started.

HP Gen8 Server Class Review

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:15:10 +0000

Hewlett-Packard has released the details of their new product line the Gen8 (don’t call me G8) servers. The new line as, you would expect, has all of the performance increases that seem necessary when coming out with a new product. The new Sandy Bridge XEON processors are onboard, they’ve increased the number of DIMM slots, increased the total amount of memory allowed per system while also increasing the memory speed supported. HP has also switched over to PCI 3.0 which is providing much faster speeds for PCI devices.