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How to provide SMI-S connectivity via Command View EVA without HBA ?

Hervé — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 23:25:53 +0000

What is SMI-S ? SMI-S is a standard communication protocol based on WBEM that helps manage heterogeneous storage arrays in the same way. Say you want to create a disk of 50GB on a HP EVA and an EMC Clariion, you will send the same SMI-S request to both and the arrays will translate the command to create the disks.

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 !

Moving to the USA for three months

Hervé — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 07:44:38 +0000

As part of an exchange program within HP, I will move for three months to Cupertino, California to support a worldwide strategic presales team.

I am really thrilled to go there for three reasons:
- being in Cupertino is an extraordinary opportunity to meet all the people from HP’s engineering teams
- belonging to this worldwide strategic presales team is a great challenge and a move outside of my comfort zone in a foreign country. I love it
- the USA is a fascinating country and I hope to learn as much as possible from a cultural point of view. Attending Toastmasters meetings there should also be very interesting

I will report about my stay in California and about my findings and experiences here.

How to become a better coach

Hervé — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:45:06 +0000

I have found this presentation made by Marshall Goldsmith, which is entitled “How to become a better coach” very useful and intersting. It had been given for HP employees but I have found a replay put on Youtube by Google. Enjoy !

Citrix certified administrator XenServer Enterprise Edition 4

Hervé — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:47:29 +0000

After I wrote my degree dissertation about Xen, I took a Citrix Xenserver 4.1 training and I successfully passed the Xenserver certification.

Even if I disagree on the evolution of the project (Red Hat resigned from it, Linux distributions are optionally supported if you install the Linux pack from another DVD and, as we expected from Citrix, virtual servers running Windows are the priority of this platform), I already have a good knowledge of this technology and since it will be soon part of HP’s Insight dynamics, a management software managing virtual machines, I thought it was a good opportunity to go on with Xen. Moreover, it is still an open-source project and that is the reason why a VMware training would not have interested me that much.

Finally, I hope that HP will continue to support other virualization projects such as KVM, which is already part of the Linux kernel, and is really being pushed forward by IBM and Red Hat, for example.