The idea behind CloudSystem Matrix is relatively simple : the whole environment should be as easy to manage as possible.

This starts first with the firmware management. All c-Class enclosures have a defined firmware level according to their Matrix version. This means that the server firmware (HBAs, BIOS, iLO, NICs, etc.), the interconnect modules (HP Virtual Connect Flex-10, Fibre channel or FlexFabric) as well as the Onboard Administrator (the enclosure management processor) have a defined firmware level that was tested and qualified to work together in the best way. Given that HP implementation services take care of the firmware deployment, the administrators don’t have to bother about it.

What can be managed by CloudSystem Matrix ?

The physical servers to be deployed must be HP blades (ProLiant x86_64 or Integrity Itanium servers).The reason for that is that we leverage the capabilities of Virtual Connect to apply network profiles (MAC addresses and WWN) and this technology is available on our blade servers.

However, the virtual machine hosts (VMware, Hyper-V, or HP-UX Integrity Virtual Machines) can be HP blades, HP rack-mount servers (Integrity and ProLiant) and even third-party servers (Dell PowerEdge 2000 series, e300 series , IBM System x servers 6000 series, r800, r900, x300 and x3000 series and IBM blade GS and LS servers) making CloudSystem Matrix probably one of the most open cloud solutions on the market.

In order CloudSystem Matrix to work, the management server needs to discover and manage the targeted equipment. The management console of the VM hosts, the management processors and the interconnect modules must be recognized by the so-called CMS (central management server). It will recognize the presence of the Virtual Connect domain group (which manages Virtual Connect for multiple enclosures) and will put the servers not used as VM hosts as possibly usable for physical deployments.

As soon as the CMS has discovered the equipment, the administrator can use its console on the CMS to create and assign pool of resources to different users.

From this management console, the administrator can manage all the elements provided to both IT architects and business users.

What IT architects need to create their cloud maps first is network connectivity. The VLANs at disposal to the IT architects are the Virtual Connect vNetworks. The administrator provides them to the IT architects using the tab “Networking” on the management console.
There, the CMS communicates with Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager and retrieves all available networks. Each network must then be configured to provide information about the range of IP addresses usable, if the IP address is allocated via DHCP or if the CMS allocates it from its pool of fix addresses.

As soon as a server is put in the enclosure and is managed by Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager, it appears in the “Unassigned” pool of resources. From here, it can be moved to a pool of resources that can be dynamically assigned to a business user. This user will only see the pool of resources that are allowed to him in his self-service portal.

In CloudSystem Matrix, the group of Administrators has all rights, hence they can see all services currently running. The business users can also FlexUp his service by adding either disks or servers to the currently running service, in case, for example, that an unexpected load occurs on the service.

From this console, the administrators can see all items that can be deployed via CloudSystem Matrix: network items, operating systems (retrieved from RDP job, Ignite depots and golden images as well as Hyper-V and VMware templates), storage pool entries, as well as servers. They can control all requests as well as currently deployed services. I will write a new post to explain exactly how the storage provisioning works.

All in all, this third post explained how administrators can, from a single point of control, manage their resources and put them at disposal to the users. The CloudSystem solution is a complete solution that can help IT departments reduce their TCO of up to 56% compared with traditional rack-mount servers. I have already deployed it for customers and must say that many of them are really impressed of the power of the overall solution.

As Command View provides SMI-S connectivity out of the box, it should be easy, right ? Wrong ! (at least in my case).

Usually, you would have a fiber channel host bus adapter connected to the Command View server. However, my CV server does not have one. Also,  the EVA ABM (Array-Based Management), an embedded tool that helps manage EVA arrays, in my case a 4400, does not provide any SMI-S connectivity. The Command View documentation nonetheless states that “If you have layered applications requiring HP SMI-S EVA, you can install the HP SMI-S EVA component on any server that is either connected to the EVA/SAN or has access to HP Command View EVA via Ethernet.”

The hard task was to find how to make this work.

SMI-S provides a utility called discoverer.bat, located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Hewlett-Packard\SMI-S\EVAProvider (yes, Command View only runs on Windows…)

Execute it

Press 1 to add the IP address and the credentials of the ABM.

Verify that the ABM was successfully discovered

Everything ran fine and now, I can discover my array through the Storage Provisioning Manager (SPM), a technology designed to present and deploy storage LUNs automatically as part of BladeSystem Matrix. I will write an entry about it later on !

CloudSystem Matrix is a private cloud solution that aims at speeding the deployment of applications through highly automated technologies and integrated processes.

After we have created and published our cloud map, we have provided our business users all the information they need in order to deploy the application they require to execute their company’s strategy.

In order to do so, the user logs in to the self-service portal.

As you can see, the home page shows which resources are put at disposal to the user, as well as the current service consumption. We see that five physical servers, out of the six at disposal, as well as two virtual machine hosts are in use as part of a service deployed by the CloudSystem Matrix. By clicking on the “Templates” tab, we can access the list of templates which are published and which the user has the right to deploy. Remember the SAP 2-tier template we created in the first part? We have published it, hence we find it back here. That the user has created the template or not, doesn’t play a role as long as he has the right to use it.

By clicking on the template, the business user can display the details of the service: the layout of the network, the price, as well as the notes entered by the creator of the template, etc. In order to deploy the service automatically, he will click on the button ‘Create service’.

The user now has to enter a service name (for instance “SAP 2-tier John Smith”), the hostname completion (remember the need for a hash sign in the first post ?), an email -to contact the service requestor-, a start date and hour at which the service will be deployed, an end-date, at which the service will be rolled back, and finally, a pool of resources, from which the resources, such as servers, storage and networking, will be picked from. Final step: he clicks on “Submit”, and here we go !

The request is sent and the activity which is happening behind the scenes is displayed: the resources are reserved from the pool of resources. The software makes sure that the pool can accommodate the need indicated in the template. We can see here that four servers, four IP addresses, three networks and four boot disks are requested. CloudSystem Matrix will pick from the pool of resources the servers that meet at least the requirements of the template and will pick from storage disks (LUNs) that are already presented to WWN (worldwide names) and also meet the size indicated.

We see here that CloudSystem Matrix also integrates nicely into the user’s processes: the request above is paused, because an administrator (or an IT manager or anyone else who should take this decision) must give his approval, so that the deployment can continue. A Request for Change (RFC) could also be triggered at this point in time with tools such as HP Service Manager or BMC’s remedy. The teams using these tools will just have to accept the request and the deployment will go on.

We see here that the administrator granted the authorization to deploy this service and that the allocation process has started. The requested resources are then provisionned. The physical servers are reserved and a custom HP Virtual Connect profile is applied to them. This means that we are applying one ore more MAC addresses for the network, which will be connected to the VLANs we need, as well as one or more WWN for the storage, to which disks are already presented. The zoning of the storage was already prepared, so that after the WWN is attributed to the server, it can install the operating system as well as the application straight after the VC profile was attributed.

Taking a look at the Onboard Administrator, the HP BladeSystem enclosure management processor, the server loses the “i“-icon, which means that the server has now a Virtual Connect profile

On the screenshot above, we can see “Provisioning the logical server” (either physical or virtual) and, finally, “Activating logical server”: the ProLiant or Integrity server is now starting.

If VMware or Hyper-V virtual machines were to be deployed, CloudSystem Matrix would pick the right template, clone it, provision it, and finally adapt it according to the needs of the cloud map. If HP Integrity Virtual Machine were deployed, the host would be contacted vis SSH, it would create the VM and deploy it with Ignite UX either through normal package deployment, or via a golden image, a concept similar to the VMware/Hyper-V template.

We see above that the Integrity server starts, it then boots from the network (since the disks we have presented are empty) and that Ignite UX detects a deployment request from the client.

All the deployments methods (Ignite-UX,  HP RDP, HP Server Automation, etc.) and CloudSystem Matrix can communicate with each other: the deployment server confirms to the Matrix operating environment that the deployment request of a given client was received. This is acknowledged by the management server which indicates it to the user.

Finally, after the operating system is deployed, the application is installed through the execution of a workflow (it will be the subject of another blog post in the future).

Although I discussed the technical details of what happens behind the scenes, the business users, when they make a request, can see a completely abstract high-level view of what is going on. They don’t need to know the details, they just want to know if the application was deployed.

On the picture above, the business user sees that everything went well and that his IT service is up and running. What could have taken so much time to deploy, lasted roughly one hour with HP CloudSystem Matrix.

Instead of taking months putting all the pieces together, CloudSystem Matrix orchestrates the provisioning of storage, server and networking, installs the operating system and deploys the application in an automated way, also integrating in the organizations’ processes.

It is a fantastic tool that was already embraced by customers to modernize their IT environments. I have personally helped some of them deploying this solution in their datacenters and they love it. Though it needs a good understanding of key HP technologies (HP BladeSystem, HP Virtual Connect, HP Systems Insight Manager, etc.), the HP services team take care of the deployment of the solution, and the complexity of the infrastructure is hidden to the business users.

In my third and last blog entry for this series, I will focus around managing the infrastructure to fill the different pool of resources and how to present them to the users.

When I ask my customers how long it takes them to deploy a complete IT service (i.e. architecture design, proof of concepts, physical reception of the servers, provisioning of the resources -such as storage and networking- install the operating system and configure the application) I generally hear answers going from a couple of weeks for small projects to months for more complex projects.

This is the main infrastructure issue the HP CloudSystem Matrix addresses. This Matrix is simply a complete solution made of hardware (c7000 blades enclosure and a wide choice of Intel Itanium-based Integrity or AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon based servers), software (the full stack of the so-called Insight Software Suite) and services (the HP services people come on site, install the hardware and software and customize the solution to adapt it to the customers’ needs and processes).

Instead of deploying applications the old way, HP Bladeystem Matrix really transforms the hardware in commodity hardware that can be used and reused by different services. It creates a shared-service infrastructure that can be divided in different pool of resources which users will pick in order to request a service to be deployed. We can call this a cloud infrastructure in a box, because the users request applications through a self-service portal and these applications are deployed automatically somewhere, on an highly scalable IT infrastructure the business user has no idea about – and that is not his job anyway !

To be concrete: everything starts with the Insight Orchestration Designer. In this web-based application, it is possible to create so-called “cloud maps”, or templates, which will contain all the important information to deploy IT services. Let’s say you want to deploy a SAP 2-tier infrastructure: you will need a database server and some application servers, all booting from the SAN for more flexibility, as well as some network connectivity, i.e. VLANs that will be help deploying the application and the operating system over the network through PXE-boot and also, most importantly, a network linking the application servers to the database server.

How long and in which time frame do you think your company will be able to deploy all these elements manually and individually ? If you think what you have today is not good enough, HP CloudSystem Matrix can help you.

You can create your own cloud map or pick the maps already available on the HP website. The advantage of these pre-prepared cloud maps ? They are designed according to the best practices from HP and the ISVs, such as Oracle, SAP or Red Hat, so you can be sure that you will have enough I/O resources, for instance, to accommodate the deployment of a database server.

On this example, you see the two deployment networks for PXE-boot (RDP for HP Rapid Deployment Pack for Linux on x86-64 and Ignite-UX for HP-UX). The elements, such as server groups or physical storage are picked from the top left corner, drag-and-dropped on the main surface and connected to each other. Creating such a cloud map is really easy, however, this is just a XML file, there is no on-the-fly deployment.

Then, each of the components, such as servers, storage or networking must be configured to enter the minimum requirements needed. At deployment time, the software will pick the elements from the pool of resources which meet at least these requirements. In the case below, we see that the database server will at least have two processor cores and 8GB of RAM.

Note also that you can enter the cost for physical and virtual servers, IP addresses and GB of storage. This helps give an idea of the cost of an IT service to business users. This cost can also be integrated into other applications through a REST API.

We then configure the two network interfaces defined for the HP-UX database server. The primary interface will be the one deploying the operating system (the Ignite-UX network). We then have the choice between a DHCP, static or “Automatic” IP address.

DHCP is the standard dynamic host configuration protocol and “static” will allocate a static IP address to the interface. The trade-off however, is that we won’t be able to re-use the cloud map into multiple services, since the IP address will already be taken.
The field “Automatic” resolves this problem in that the management software will take an IP address from a pre-defined range and will allocate it as a static IP address for the duration of the service. The server, when it restarts, for instance, will keep the same static IP address. When the service is erased, the “Automatic” IP address will be sent back to the pool and can be reused for other services.

Finally, the hostname must contain a hash (#) sign. The reason is that, again, this template can be deployed multiple times and the hostnames need to be different at every deployment. At deployment time, the #-sign will be replaced by a completion string given by the service requester.

We now have to select the operating system that will run on the selected server. In our case, we use HP-UX 11i v3. The x86_64 servers can use Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Windows. Virtual machines running on the top of VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V can also be included in these cloud maps and be provisioned and deployed automatically.

After the main characteristics of the server were defined, we can now make use of the workflows to finish the cloud map. In our case, the workflow “SAPInstall” will be executed at the end of the creation of the service. This means that the SAP instance will be deployed on our newly provisioned infrastructure.This technology is based on HP Operations Orchestration and allows to customize the deployment of the service down to the smallest detail (e.g. change of a kernel parameter,etc.)

At that point in time, it is possible to create your own workflows, such as an integration with HP’s Universal CMDB to update it with the service, or open an new Request for change (RfC) in HP Service Manager or with BMC’s Remedy. The customers can hence integrate the deployment of their services in their already existing ITIL change processes.

Our cloud map is now ready to be deployed. The logo next to “validation status” is now green, which means that we have enough informations to deploy this service. We now save it and tick the box “Published”, so that business users will be able to select this cloud map from their service catalogue and request it to be deployed automatically.

The creation of a cloud map was an easy thing. Remember, though, that HP, in co-operation with ISV’s provide cloud maps ready to be deployed. In my next post, I will show you how to request a service to be deployed and what happens behind the scenes. Stay tuned !

According to Sam Palmisano, HP is not an innovative company enough and hence had to look for external companies to fuel its external growth in the storage market.

Interestingly, IBM, lagging by far in the blade market versus HP (around 50% worldwide unit market share for HP vs. around 30% for IBM), acquired Blades Network Technology – BNT - a small networking company that provides interconnect modules for both IBM and HP enclosures. So if I understand correctly, according to Mr Palmisano, a company that acquires another one for its technology is “not innovative enough”. My conclusion is:  IBM is not innovative enough in the blade market (open fabric manager is a mere joke compared to the management capabilities of HP Virtual Connect)  and hence had to buy another that will provide some competitive advantage.

Sam Palmisano: do what I say, not what I do…

While Mark Hurd was often seen as a tough CEO, especially from HP’s older employees, I personally think he has done a great job at the top of the company. Some criticized him for having killed the “HP way”, which was one of HP’s fundamental approach of dealing with employees but, since Carly Fiorina’s time as a CEO, has lost more and more importance in the company. Despite HP’s R&D reorganization, some revolutionary products such as Virtual Connect or HP BladeSystem Matrix were brought to the market when he was a CEO. Mark Hurd made of HP the number one IT company in the world, before IBM and its financial results always (at least since 2007, year of my enrolment) outperformed the expectations, and that is, I think, the most important. The best job security is to work in a company that actually makes profits.

I was very impressed by Mark Hurd’s performance on the following video of the Haas School of Business. What I will remember from this talk is the mantra of any CEO: “To succeed, you need three things: to have a vision, to execute it, and you need the best people”. I wish the next CEO of HP will succeed as Mark Hurd did.

SUN’s stock has increased of 78% yesterday, meaning that Wall Street is taking the rumors pretty seriously.

This move would create an industry giant and would reinforce IBM on the server as well as on the software and services market. Synergy effects resulting from this acquisition would especially help IBM compete against HP on the server and storage market. SUN’s latest financial results were poor and even put in question the viability of the company itself. SUN’s customers can now be sure that one strong company will support them. On the hardware side, IBM’s and SUN’s blade market shares account respectively for 25% and 5% of the total. A consolidation of these portfolios could help IBM compete against HP’s unrivaled leadership on this fast-growing market. IBM and SUN already work together (Lotus Symphony, IBM’s collaboration suite, already integrates SUN’s open-source OpenOffice.org tools suite) and these two companies are known to be strong open-source advocates. However, this acquisition still raises lots of questions.

SUN develops (with Fujitsu) its own SPARC processor line for high-end, business-critical servers and IBM’s POWER processors are their direct competitors. Processor development is an extremely expensive process and I cannot imagine IBM maintaining two different processor lines within the same company and I assume IBM would eventually drop SPARC. So what about customers, especially in the financial and communication industries which have a big SPARC install base ?

AIX, IBM’s Unix, competes directly versus SUN’s operating system Solaris on SPARC, moreover, Solaris is a direct competitor to Linux on the mass market x86. SUN’s strategy toward Linux has always been from hesitant to hostile whereas IBM has always been a great Linux supporter. Big Blue will have to deal with a portfolio problem, as well as with internal cultural problems. Solaris’ users and admins are very loyal to it and SUN has put Solaris at the heart of its datacenter strategy. If IBM was to drop Solaris for AIX, this would mean a lot of frustration for the Solaris community.

Finally, on the database level, IBM’s DB2 and Informix compete versus MySQL and PostgreSQL (the latter not directly owned but pushed by SUN) and SUN’s open source application server Glassfish is a direct threat to IBM’s middleware technology Websphere.

A merger between SUN and Dell would have made more sense from a pure portfolio perspective :
- Dell has a strong blade and x86 portfolio
- it owns no business-critical line of servers
- it could have pushed Solaris on x86
- Dell has no footprint neither on the application, nor on the middleware, nor on the application layer.
Perhaps has IBM moved before Dell did, fearing an emerging third strong player on the datacenter market.

Even though SUN’s acquisition by IBM is not official yet, I think the two companies will have really a hard time until they are completely integrated. The two companies have different technology and business cultures and SUN’s products mostly directly compete with IBM’s. Furthermore, today’s economic climate will make things even harder, since Big Blue could loose a lot of energy for the integration instead of focusing on customers. Of course, both companies together can leverage their huge portfolio to create synergy effects, however, I doubt this would happen soon.

sudo modprobe kvm-intel
FATAL: Error inserting kvm_intel (/lib/modules/2.6.20-6-generic/kernel/drivers/kvm/kvm-intel.ko): Operation not permitted

In order to fully use your Intel processor on a HP laptop, follow the following steps :

- boot your computer
- when the BIOS window shows up, enter the BIOS manager
- enable the Virtualization technology in the BIOS menu
- save the changes and exit
- shut down your computer
- remove the battery and put it back in your PC
- boot your computer

and Intel VT should work without problem.