Best Practice for Ongoing Support of BladeSystem and Matrix

[chuckk281]

Jon was looking for info to help a customer with upgrade issues:

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Hi –

I am working with an Enterprise Customer who has a significant BladeSystem rollout.

We are having discussions around Matrix in the customer as well, and the high level messaging is being well received.  However the Operations team are very nervous and have challenged us to provide a view on how they can improve their processes and the way that they should manage BladeSystem deployments and Matrix deployments going forward.

Example of their questioning  (for example) are:

• If they have a Matrix deployment with a mix of G6 and G7 blades, how would they practically manage a physical server movement between blade generations when their qualified OS builds for each are different ?
• What is the best practice around mixing blade generations in an enclosure ?
• What is the best way to design for non-disruptive upgrades so that Application continuity can be maintained (they run 24x7) ?
• Etc.

Any Whitepapers or guidance here would be appreciated.

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Marilyn provided Jon with some info:

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Hi, Jon.

Realize that this may be tedious reading but have you read the following?

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/literature.html

» HP BladeSystem Firmware Management Best Practices
» HP BladeSystem ProLiant Firmware Management Best Practices Implementer Guide

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Comments or suggestions??