If you\u2019ve ever seen the back of a server rack that I\u2019ve cabled then you\u2019d never let me even plug in a power lead to a kettle.\u00a0 I am horrible at cabling.\u00a0 Simply awful at it.\u00a0 Those probably aren\u2019t strong enough phrases to be honest.\u00a0 That\u2019s one of the reasons I like blade\/SAN technology; there\u2019s a minimal amount of cabling and it\u2019s all usually done by an expert engineer who\u2019s installing the blade chassis and the SAN.\u00a0 When we put in our gear, I made sure it was!<\/p>\n
The engineer did a nice job at labelling everything.\u00a0 All lead placements were planned.\u00a0 We\u2019ve a network mesh going back to our access switches from the blade Ethernet virtual connects.\u00a0 There\u2019s a divergent path between the blade fibre virtual connects, the fibre switches and the SAN chassis units.\u00a0 Each server has dual channel HBA mezzanine cards And power is split between circuit A and B in each rack.\u00a0 That means we can lose a circuit and still be operational.\u00a0 Adding servers doesn\u2019t require more cabling \u2013 only adding a chassis does and then I\u2019ll get the engineer to do the work \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
Note: We went with Brocade mezzanine cards instead of the Emulex ones.\u00a0 At my last job we had 128 HP BL460C\u2019s with Emulex HBA\u2019s.\u00a0 I\u2019d say at least a quarter of the HBA\u2019s had to be replaced in the month before we went into production.\u00a0 I spoke with an engineer from the reseller recently and he said they were still regularly failing.\u00a0 We haven\u2019t had any issues with the Brocade ones.<\/em><\/p>\n We put the power and fibre channel fault tolerance to test today.\u00a0 We needed to replace 2 Power Distributions Units (PDU\u2019s).\u00a0 They have management boards on them that the data centre doesn\u2019t use.\u00a0 Instead they have an out-of-band management system.\u00a0 The management boards faulted so we had annoying alarm lights and sirens.\u00a0 We often bring people in for a show\u2019n\u2019tell during pre-sales so alarms are not good, even if they mean nothing, which they did.\u00a0 The data centre power management system and our OpsMgr 2007 HP Management Packs would have told us if we had a power issue.<\/p>\n We scheduled the replacement for this afternoon.\u00a0 Outages are out of the question for the mission critical services we provide to our managed server hosting customers.\u00a0 We swapped out the PDU\u2019s with the alarms.\u00a0 Not a single flicker of a problem was seen.\u00a0 I watched the OpsMgr console for alerts while I was logged into a few VM\u2019s (stored on the SAN) running tests.\u00a0 The MPIO fault tolerance (Windows Server 2008 SP2) and the power fault tolerance of the SAN\/Blades worked.<\/p>\n I was pretty confident of there not being an issue.\u00a0 Everything was tested by the HP engineer when we did the installation last year.\u00a0 All the hardware was looking healthy and the \u201cboard\u201d was green in OpsMgr 2007.\u00a0 This just shows how a little bit of planning before you plug things in and a little testing afterwards works in your favour.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you\u2019ve ever seen the back of a server rack that I\u2019ve cabled then you\u2019d never let me even plug in a power lead to a kettle.\u00a0 I am horrible at cabling.\u00a0 Simply awful at it.\u00a0 Those probably aren\u2019t strong enough phrases to be honest.\u00a0 That\u2019s one of the reasons I like blade\/SAN technology; there\u2019s … Continue reading “Planning Works Out”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hardware"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9717\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}