topic BL460c and Hyper-V in BladeSystem - General

BL460c and Hyper-V

Halliford — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:43:42 GMT

I am relatively new to blade servers and have "inherited" a setup comprising 2 BL460c servers, an SB40c storage blade, a PCI expansion blade with a fibre channel HBA in it and a Storageworks Tape loader. One server is partnered with the SB40c and the other is partnered with the expansion blade (FC HBA).

Both servers are running W2K8 32-bit at present with Backup Exec writing to the tape unit.

I would like to install Hyper-V server to virtualise the servers (and add some 64b versions) but don't know whether the fibre HBA can be passed through to a virtual server so I can have a tape backup running on a virtual machine.

Presumably, an alternative would be to have a full install of W2K8 backing up to the tape and Hyper-V role doing VMs but I would prefer it if I could use Hyper-V.

Will the BL460c setup I have work this way or should it be done another way? (Xenserver/VMware?)

Many thanks for any advice,

Tim.

Re: BL460c and Hyper-V

Igor Karasik — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 06:40:49 GMT

>> whether the fibre HBA can be passed through to a virtual server

In Hyper-V - you cannot. Don't know about VMware/etc
You even cannot use tape with windows 2008 built-in backup tool, not to mention Hyper-V VM :-)

>> would like to install Hyper-V server to virtualise the servers

You can install Hyper-V on server connected to SB40c, but you will have "performance penalty" if install Hyper-V on second server ! BL460c have only 2 drives ....
VM require many I/O, and two drives it is not enough

>>with Backup Exec writing to the tape unit.

Just FYI:
With Backup Exec 12.5 you can use Hyper-V agent for backup guest VM and you can backup
unlimited number of guest machines on host server with 1 license !

Re: BL460c and Hyper-V

Uwe Zessin — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:17:17 GMT

In ESX3, neither. In ESX4 only _some_ adapters are supported for path-through and it only works on the very latest hardware technology.

FC-attached tape drives are not supported on ESX - sometimes it is possible to add a tape / changer SCSI LUN as a pass-through, but don't expect any help if there are problems.

Re: BL460c and Hyper-V

Halliford — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:56:03 GMT

Thanks to you both for the info. I gues whoever specced the blade system in the first place didn't consider virtualisation!

Closing this thread on the basis that it can't be done the way I'd prefer with what I've got!