dell

How to Replace an SD Card in a Dell PowerEdge Server

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We use the Dell Internal Dual SD module (IDSDM) for our VMware ESXi hosts. It works great, and saves us a bunch of money per server in that we don’t need RAID controllers, spinning disks, etc. Ours are populated with two 2 GB SD cards from the factory, and set to Mirror Mode in the BIOS. The other day we received an alarm: Failure detected on Internal Dual SD Module SD2 We’d never seen a failure like this so we had no idea how to fix it, and the Internet was only slightly helpful (hence the point of this writeup). Here’s what we did to replace it. Note: I’m certified to work on Dell servers, and have been messing with …

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Table Stakes for Storage Arrays

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I was just looking at Andreas Lesslhumer’s post about blog posting volume in the virtualization community, and it’s depressing. I didn’t blog a whole lot here last year. Why was that? Because I was writing elsewhere! Speaking of that, the first half of my “Six Features You Absolutely Need on Your Storage in 2015” list is up over at The Virtualization Practice, wherein I outline what the table stakes are for enterprise storage arrays, get only slightly snarky about why we’re still discussing, as an industry, why & how to use flash, and highlight the good work some vendors are doing (SolidFire, Dell, and Tintri in this post, more in next week’s second part). Check it out.

New Java Security Settings: More Proof That Oracle Hates You

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I began the day yesterday updating to Java 7u51, after which absolutely none of my enterprise Java applications worked anymore. I could not reach the consoles of my Rackspace cloud servers. I could not open the iDRAC console on my Dell PowerEdge. They all exited with some error about the Permissions attribute not being set. Being the guy that I am I decided to search for the error. Turns out that 7u51 sneaks a major change in a point release: on the default Java security slider setting of “high” no applet may run if it’s self-signed, unsigned, or is missing the Permissions attribute. Unfortunately, that describes all enterprise software, at least all the current versions of things I’m using. This isn’t …

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VMware vSphere 5.5 & Dell 12G Servers: Reliable Memory Technology

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A few days ago Dell released BIOS updates for their 12th generation servers. Among all the notes about preparations for the Intel E5-2600 v2 refresh there’s one line that’s of interest to those of us thinking about running vSphere 5.5 on our version 1 12G hardware: New Memory Operating Mode setup option ‘Dell Fault Resilient Mode’ This is a patented new technology from Dell, wherein the hypervisor and system hardware can work together to place the hypervisor in a more redundant section of memory. Dell servers have shipped with a variety of tricks to protect against memory faults, things like Memory Page Retire, which will dynamically remove a page from usable memory space if it encounters an error. However, to …

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Shameless Self Promotion – Active System & OpenStack Edition

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I’m continuing to write over at The Virtualization Practice, and it’s been fun so far. Those of you following what I’ve been doing have probably seen me take a real turn towards converged infrastructures in the last six months, both for TVP and for TechTarget. Not that I don’t think the public cloud is attractive to many, but hardware vendors are doing some real interesting things that are keeping on-site IT fairly attractive. Plus the local telco lobbies and myopic/dirty legislators seem to be keeping inexpensive bandwidth, the Achilles heel of the cloud, to a minimum in most non-urban places. Anyhow, we’ve got: A Look at the Dell Active System 800 wherein I’m trying to figure out if Dell’s converged anything …

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VMware & Virsto

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Howard Marks has a great piece on VMware buying Virsto over at Network Computing (link is below): Some of my fellow analysts have lumped Virsto into the flash acceleration category along with caching solutions like Proximal Data, Sandisk’s Flashsoft and Intel’s CAS. While Virsto can use flash to accelerate some storage I/O, it’s not primarily a flash acceleration product. In fact, Virsto is a log-based, clustered file system that uses a dedicated log device, which can be a shared SSD, to accelerate virtual machine I/O. I saw Virsto for the first time at VMworld 2012, and it looked interesting as something that tries to turn a lot of the random I/O from a virtualization environment back into sequential I/O that arrays can better handle, while adding a …

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VMmark 2.5

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Oooh, a new version of VMmark is out. From Bruce Herndon on the VROOM! blog: I am pleased to announce the release of VMmark 2.5, the latest edition of VMware’s multi-host consolidation benchmark. The most notable change in VMmark 2.5 is the addition of optional power measurements for servers and servers plus storage. This capability will assist IT architects who wish to consider trade-offs in performance and power consumption when designing datacenters or evaluating new and emerging technologies, such as flash-based storage. A long time ago I was pretty skeptical of yet-another-benchmark, but it’s been useful to help compare physical hosts with virtual workloads. Unlike most benchmarks, the results from previous versions are still relevant to the new version. I …

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Critical Dell BMC Firmware Update

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If you’re running a Dell PowerEdge 1900, 1950, 2900, 2950, 2970, 6950, R300, T300, R605, R805, or R905 there are urgent & critical security updates that have been released by Dell on October 15, 2012. Similarly, there’s an urgent update to the Dell-supplied ESXi 4.0 U4 software. Dell describes the fixes as “Critical Security Update –Urgent BMC Release.” To me that says Dell fixed something that’s remotely exploitable and doesn’t want to say what it was out of fear of tipping off troublemakers. I always like to know what the problem is, figuring that the bad guys probably already know, and it helps me determine my priority for the fix. Moral of the story is that if your older Dell server …

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Dell PowerEdge 12G Is Here

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Over the last week there’s been a number of different posts about the new Dell PowerEdge models, the 12th generation (12G) of their server line. I was briefed both by Dell technical staff and by Dell executive staff on the Rx20 lineup and I took a few notes. I was mainly briefed about the Dell PowerEdge R620, R720, R720xd, which will be in the first wave of refreshes. The higher-end models, like the R820 and R920, and the cloud & HPC focused C-series, will be part of another release soon after, and reach into the higher-end E7 CPU models (8 way, 10 cores) from Intel. The new mid-range hosts are built around the Intel Xeon E5 CPUs, also known as …

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Dell, SSD, CacheCade, and H700/H800 Controllers

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Dell’s announcement last week that their rebranded LSI RAID controllers, the H700 & H800, now have the ability to use certain local SSD disks as a read cache tier. This is the “CacheCade” technology LSI has offered since September 2010, and looks functionally similar to technologies like NetApp’s FlashCache, where SSD maintains a copy of “hot” blocks on the fast storage. There are some limitations to it, namely that it will require the H700/H800 models with 1 GB of NVRAM on them, and comes as part of a certain firmware level. The feature will also only work with certain SSDs from Dell, so you can’t plan to just cram a cheap Intel X-25 in there (which is unfortunate, in my …

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