topic Re: Anybody using CloudMatrix in BladeSystem - General

Anybody using CloudMatrix

bazeemuddin — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:48:34 GMT

Hello,

Have you implemented BladeMatrix or CloudMatrix?

Any lessons?

(Please dont post docs. I have all of them).

Thanks.

Re: Anybody using CloudMatrix

Psychonaut — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:31:39 GMT

Great question, any experiences (good or bad) would be greatly appreciated. HP is trying real hard to get this in.

I've heard it is more complex if the storage is not HP, have people seen that?

Thanks!

Re: Anybody using CloudMatrix

jamamushi — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 05:34:58 GMT

I just recently started a job and we had HP pitch and successfully talk the customer into purchasing the Matrix. I have so far not found anything useful about it, but the reason for that is that we are not using it to its full potential. Just last week I had HP on site to upgrade the Matrix and asked what the true benefits were. I was told that the real purpose of the Matrix was bare metal and VM provisioning, which we are not using. It also provides a single interface through which you can manage multiple enclosure (up to 4 he said was recommended, we of course of 7 under one instance). For instance you can change your host profiles of multiple enclosures (The interface is called Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager). In my case, it was set up incorrectly, so all enclosures are within one virtual connect domain group. This means if you for example delete a network from one profile, it will remove it from all. Dangerous! he other piece is hardware monitoring (System Insight Manager SIM), but we are not using that either.
If the Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager was set up correctly though, it could make administration easier in an ESX environment where all the hosts are pretty much the same. But I am only using a very small stack of the Matrix, hence I think it is a waste of money. Once you have the Matrix control the blades, Virtual Connect of all enclosures under it will be locked, and you cannot make any changes via the individual VC modules. That I find to be a huge pain. You have to log into the Matrix web interface, hope that the HP proprietary web services are started, which a lot of the time they aren't and I have to troubleshoot that for 30 minutes., then put the enclosures into domain maintenance mode. Only after that can you make changes to the VCs. And it happened to me that during a firmware upgrade the Matrix took control of the enclosure I was working on by itself and it screwed up the upgrade, it just hung for 1 hour and I had to reboot the module.

So I am not a fan of what we are using it for: single interface to manage the enclosures' VCs. I cannot speak to the provisioning piece, maybe that works great.

Re: Anybody using CloudMatrix

jamamushi — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 05:42:10 GMT

One more thing...I am very opposed to HP not supporting the Matrix to be run on a VM. No reason was given as to why they won't support it. The SQL instance they also recommend to be run on physical HW.

Re: Anybody using CloudMatrix

Psychonaut — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:53:27 GMT

You also get automatic L2 support when you call in. Did you call in with the firmware problems you saw? I believe HP wants an onsite visit to do firmware upgrades and they frown upon out of band updates.

Re: Anybody using CloudMatrix

jamamushi — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 18:48:41 GMT

Yes you are right, HP wants to do the firmware upgrades. But in my case I had a failed VC module and it is nearly impossible to get Matrix support on the fly. In fact when I called in I was told that the Matrix expert was on an assignment and it sounded like they only had a very limited number of experts nation wide. This was 5 months ago, so maybe things have changed since.