Monitoring an HP MSA Array

We continue with more things that we can monitor with Nagios or Centreon! If we have an HP MSA storage array in our organization, either fiber or iSCSI, This is your document! In a simple way, we can absorb the information that we are interested in controlling through SNMP, Be the state of the hard drives, The controllers, Volumes, RAID, Temperatures, Chassis Condition, Alerts, etc, etc…

Booting HP Firmware Maintenance or HP SmartStart CDs with a USB flash drive

I've been wanting to post this post for a long time, something simple like the previous one but many times we find ourselves (for savings issues) HP servers without CD drive, so before installing the operating system we need to update the firmware of all the components of the server with the HP Firmware Maintenance CD and later with the HP SmartStart CD prepare the boot, install HP utilities and drivers on the machine itself. In the case of not having a server with a CD drive, we can with an HP utility dump them into an external USB drive or a pen drive.

Configuring an HP BladeSystem

In this document we see a server system that is already quite common in any more or less nice environment, I am not going to go into the issue of whether it is better for some environments or others, Not even if it's more comfortable, simple, Spend less… we will see an HP-based blade environment, this is an HP BladeSystem, no specific model and we will see all the configuration that we can make from its OA, or HP Onboard Administrator, which will be the management console for the entire chassis, of the 'irons', From this console we will be able to manage any component/element, as well as to see their status at all times.

Setting up an HP Lefthand array

In this document you will see certain generic configurations that allow these HP SAN arrays called HP Lefthand, this case is carried out by means of virtual arrays under a VMware environment, as they allow you to work perfectly in a much more flexible laboratory environment. HP has several models of physical Lefthand arrays, all with the same system, but with different capacities, Disc Models, Ethernet Mouths… would be the HP LeftHand P4500 and HP LeftHand P4300 series. But also for production environments there is the HP LeftHand P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance or VSA. In this document we will see the main characteristics of the cabins, such as storage clustering (gives greater performance and capacity), Network RAID (Increased data availability), Thin provisioning (Reduces costs and improves disk capacity utilization), iSCSI (Ethernet network technology) Snapshots and Replication using Remote Copy (for local replication […]

Virtualize an HP Lefthand Array

This is a simple thing, but I document it because not whoever manages storage systems has to know how VMware works, so it feels 😉 like having a storage cabin, a virtualized SAN can serve two purposes, one testing laboratory or a second case, for production. I am not very supportive of this last option, It's a personal thing, HP advises it, for certain small environment scenarios it could be right, couldn't?. But, well, it is always interesting to be able to operate a cabin freely or more visually in a virtual environment such as VMware's. HP Lefthand physical arrays follow the nomenclature of 'HP LeftHand P4000 SAN’ have several models, The P4300, P4500… but in virtual environment the nomenclature changes to HP Lefthand VSA or HP LeftHand P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance.

Setting up an MSA – HP StorageWorks Modular SAN Array 1000 with ESX

In this document we will explain how we will connect this SAN to ESX servers, the logical thing is that we have an MSA with two controllers (otherwise, It doesn't make much sense to invest so much, if we don't have redundancy in controllers), as well as two fiber switches on the back to have redundancy at the switch level as well. And on each ESX server we will place a couple of fiber optic HBA's, to which we will connect each HBA to a fiber switch to have a high availability system.

Create a team with the fault tolerance network cards

If we normally work with HP servers (with other suppliers/manufacturers there are also, but not explained herein) We will be able to enable a feature that is normally mandatory if possible. Servers typically come with more than one network adapter, At least two adapters come integrated into the board, whether the server will only need to use a network adapter, What is usually done is a 'team’ to create a virtual network connection between the two for high fault tolerance, because if one network adapter fails, nothing would happen because we have the other adapter in this 'team'. Ideally, you should connect each network adapter to a separate switch, because if the switch also failed, we would have another adapter connected to another switch.

Setting up and managing an EVA – HP StorageWorks EVA – HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array – 4100 – 4400 – 6100 or 8100

In this document we will see in detail all the hardware of these controllers, Disk Cases and Fiber Switches. Later we will configure an EVA 8000 new, Creating a New Disk Group, Creating Virtual Disks, adding hosts and presenting these virtual disks to the hosts. We will also update the firmware, We will create snapshots, Snapclones… all this from HP Command View.

Installing and Configuring an HP StorageWorks D2D – HP D2D

GOOD, In this document we will see how we can configure the hardware backup system under a Backup Exec 12d, In this document we will show how to connect this server that uses an iSCSI network to a backup server. We'll need a gigabit network to get started, we will connect the D2D to this network and the BackupExec server as well, The ideal, of course, it is a separate network and the backup server has a dedicated network adapter. We will use the Backup Exec server so that you can make backups to the D2D tapes or to your disks.