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Never setup a Blade C7000 before...

 
CPA-UK
Occasional Advisor

Never setup a Blade C7000 before...

Hi all...

 

First off I'm a total new boy to building a Blade, and I was wondering if anyone could just give me a quick hand up as to the very basics of this...?

 

What I have is a C7000 Blade, with 128GB RAM, 8 x BL460c Blades, 1 x Storage Blade, 3 x 1.2TB HDD's... I also have a copy of MS SERVER 2012 R2 DataCentre...

 

I need some dead simple help regarding how the various bit install and where...

 

My plan is to use the Storage Blade and the 3 x 1.2TB drives as a shared storage area and to boot the Blade from this..., and to have the Blades setup for each of my customers.., the bit I can't get my head round is how do all the various bits and in what order...

 

What has confused me is the inital setup of the Storage Blade and the first Blade...

 

My understanding is that you install VSA on the Storage Blade first...?, how exactly do you do this..?, and from where.., do you plug your first Blade in...?, and run the install from there..?

 

Then once you have the Storage Blade setup..., how do you setup your first Blade..?.., as I don't want any drives in the front of the Blade..., I want it to boot from the shared storage...

 

As you can tell, I have got my head in a complete knot with this..., I'm very familiar with setting up standalone Hyper-V servers with multiple VM's but never toched anything like this before..., and I just need someone to get me started with some dead simple instructions... I don't want to go in too deep just yet, but just the basics of what installs where etc..

 

I really would appricate some help...

 

Thanks in advance...

18 REPLIES 18
Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Never setup a Blade C7000 before...

What exactly is your "storage blade"?

 

Usually these are disk chassis, so these disks are physically connected to a single server (e.g. D2220sb).

 

What interconnects do you have?

 

 


Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

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CPA-UK
Occasional Advisor

Re: Never setup a Blade C7000 before...

Hi Torsten, thanks for taking the time to assist...

 

This is what we are going for..

 

HP PROLIANT C7000 BLADE ENCLOSURE - 10U RACK MOUNTABLE
2 x CISCO CATALYST BLADE SWITCH 3020 GIGABIT
1 x CONTROLLER MODULE CARD
10 x C7000 FANS
6 x C7000 POWER SUPPLIES
1 X RACK KIT
1 x HP STORAGEWORKS D2200sb - 12 BAY 2.5" SAS SATA STORAGE BLADE SERVER - AP880A
3 x 2.5" 1.2TB 10K 6GBPS SAS HARD DRIVES
8 x HP PROLIANT BL460C G6 BLADE SERVERS EACH WITH;2 x INTEL XEON E5504 CPU 2.0GHZ 4CORE 4MB PROCESSORS; 8GB OF PC3-8500R RAM
1x SMART ARRAY P410 CONTROLLER 256MB
1 x HP BLC7000 ADMIN MODULE - 414055-001
HP / CISCO CATALYST BLADE SWITCH 3020 GIGABIT FOR C-CLASS BLADESYSTEM -
403321-B22 - 432904-001

 

Hope that is what you were after...

 

Regards

Colin

Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Never setup a Blade C7000 before...

I'm really not an expert for ESX and similar.

 

However, the storage blade is not a shared device at all, but connected to a single server only.

AFAIK for VSA without shared storage you need the same amount of local space for each host.

A single device (like your storage blade) is a risky SPOF anyway.


Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

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those who understand binary, and those who don't.

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CPA-UK
Occasional Advisor

Re: Never setup a Blade C7000 before...

Mmm, I must say that is not how I understand it work...

 

http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=c04111597

 

This seems to say that it is a device that can be used for shared storage across mulitple servers..., and this acts as a local SAN...

 

Any other help here would be much appreciated...

Jimmy Vance
HPE Pro

Re: Never setup a Blade C7000 before...

 The  D2200 storage blade is a direct attach device. It will conenct to one server. You then load the HP VSA on that server and it becoames an iSCSI SAN that can be used by the other blades

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Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Never setup a Blade C7000 before...

yes, there is hp vsa and vmware vsa, both similar, but a single storage remains a risky spof, once the storage server is down, all your servers are down. double everythong, at least.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

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CPA-UK
Occasional Advisor

Re: Never setup a Blade C7000 before...

Oh, I see..., so how do you get round all this...?

 

You only have two slots in the front of each individual Blade.., and that is not enough to do too much...?, where does the O/S boot from..?, and can you not boot from the SAN...?

 

Sorry, if all these are daft questions..., as I've never used one I just can't see what goes where etc...

Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Never setup a Blade C7000 before...

how about a second d2200 for redundancy? no matter if you use hp or vmware vsa.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

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CPA-UK
Occasional Advisor

Re: Never setup a Blade C7000 before...

I guess you could..., it's just all getting very expensive...

 

The reason I was heading down this route is that we were advised by an HP partner that the Storge Blade was the answer to the SAN type solution...

 

I'm even more lost to be honest.. :-(