Importing enclosures - with exception of VC?

[James McMillan_3]

Hi

To use OneView, you need to import the VC configuration, which requires downtime. I understand the current technical need for the downtime, but won't this requirement severely hinder take-up of OneView?  Assuming virtualisation is in use, you might have 400 VMs that need to be taken into account.  Granted, in very large environments, there might be capacity to vMotion them to other enclosures.. but not so much for medium businesses I suspect.

Does anyone know if a future version will allow you to import an enclosure for management, but excluding the VC aspect?  I've been told no, but I just spotted a paragraph in an HP ATP Silver Server Study Guide, that suggests if the VC firmware is not supported (below 4.10), the modules will remain in an unmanaged state until you upgrade the firmware.  It doesn't say whether you can still import the enclosure and the VC remains managed by VCM/VCEM in that scenario.

Any comments on this?  I'm also curios how many out there are arranging downtime in order to utilise OneView?

Cheers, James

[ChrisLynch]

Hello, and welcome to the HP OneView Community.

We cannot discuss unreleased or future versions of products in a public forum such as this.

To your question about importing an enclosure with older firmware and the VC interconnects are put into Inventory state, that is true.  However, the configuration is wiped and would cause an outage. 

I would encourage you to look at the VCM to HP OneView PowerShell migration tool that is available on GitHub.  It provides the ability to migrate supported configurations to HP OneView 1.10, and is a 2 step process.  The execution script will first run a compatibility check against the target enclosure.  If there are no prohibited configurations, a subsequent PowerShell script (and associated files) will be created that you must then manually run .  This will help you preserve the original VC configuration.  In most scenarios, we have seen a migration take 45minutes to run .  So with proper planning, migration to HP OneView (again, with supported configurations) can be possible.  Documentation for this tool is available here.

[James McMillan_3]

Hi Chris

Thanks for the reply.  I'm aware of the next couple of releases.. I'm of course under an NDA so can't/won't say anything here.  I just wanted to start the conversation going really.

While the HP side of things might be ~45 mins of downtime.. the pre/post tasks needed in order to bring down/migrate a potential 400 VMs would be considerably more.

I was hoping to gauge what people 'out there' were doing generally.  It looks like such a great product, with huge potential, and I'm convinced that take up would be so much greater if the one item requiring downtime, could be bypassed and left un-managed by OneView.

Cheers, James

[ChrisLynch]

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I was hoping to gauge what people 'out there' were doing generally.  It looks like such a great product, with huge potential, and I'm convinced that take up would be so much greater if the one item requiring downtime, could be bypassed and left un-managed by OneView.

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Unfortunately, either a brand new configuration or migration with downtime are the only two methods available today.

Some of my customers that are looking to move to HP OneView do have extra capacity in their data center where they can move workloads around, and take an enlcosure offline 1 by 1.  Certainly not everyone can afford that.  All I can say is that the product team is very well aware of this requirement for customers, and we are working on a number of different solutions.

[micke_christen]

Hi!

This new migration script? If you have a VCEM-managed environment with, lets say 6 chassis.

Is it possible to save all configuration from VCEM and import it in to OneView and then shut down one chassi at a time?

In that case it is possible to move VM:s from 1 entire chassi to another and then import the first chassi to OneView and then go through all chassis.

One problem is happening when deleting the six domains in VCEM. 

How to do this is not mentioned in details in the migration.

Is it possible to do this in sequense and take one chassi first and then the take one by one?

/Mikael Christenson

[ChrisLynch]

Currently, HP OneView does not have a built-in method of migration an existing configuration, VCM or VCEM.  The migration tool/script I referred to above is for VCM configurations.  Now, VCEM doesn't really maintain a "running" configuration of the VC Domains it manages.  A Domain Group contains a reference configuration used for deploying to new enclosures where VCM hasn't been configured.

The migration tool/script can be used to migrate VCEM managed VC Domains, but the VC Domain would first have to be removed from the VCEM Domain Group before attempting to migrate the VC Domain into HP OneView.  Importing and Exporting a VC Domain from a VCEM Domain Group doesn't require downtime, as VCM is utimately the manager.

Keep in mind when HP OneView is managing a Virtual Connect environment, VCM is no longer running and isn't the manager.  Rather, HP OneView is.  So this is a completely different architecture then VCM and VCEM.