Hpe

HPE StoreVirtual is a scale-out storage platform, that is designed to meet the needs of virtualized environments. It’s based on LeftHand OS and because the magic is a piece of software, HPE StoreVirtual is available as HPE ProLiant/ BladeSystem-based hardware, or as Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) for VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM. It comes with an all-inclusive enterprise feature set. This feature set provides

• Storage clustering
• Network RAID
• Thin Provisioning (with support for space reclamation)
• Snapshots
• Asynchronous and synchronous replication across multiple sites
• Automated software upgrades and self-healing storage
• Adaptive Optimization (Tiering)

The license is alway all-inclusive. There is no need to license individual features.

Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs are all the rage. REST was defined by Roy Thomas Fielding in his PhD dissertation “Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures". The architectural style of REST describes six constraints:

• Uniform interface
• Stateless
• Cacheable
• Client - Server communication
• Layered system
• Code on demand

RESTful APIs typically use HTTP and HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.) to send data to, or retrieve data from remote systems. To do so, REST APIs use Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to interact with remote systems. Thus, a client can interact with a remote system over a REST API using standard HTTP URIs and HTTP verbs. For the data transfer, common internet media types, like JSON or XML are used. It’s important to understand that REST is not a standard per se. But most implementations make use of standards such as HTTP, URI, JSON or XML.

In March 2016, HPE CEO Meg Whitman announced a ProLiant-based HCI solution, that should be easier to use and cheaper than Nutanix.

This isn’t HPEs first dance on this floor. In August 2015, HP launched the Hyper Converged 250 System (HC250), which is based on the Apollo server platform. The HW design of the HC250 comes close to a Nutanix Block, because the Apollo platform supports up to four nodes in 2U. Let me say this clear: The Hyper Converged 380 (HC380) is not a replacement for the HC250! And before the HC250, HPE offered the Converged System 200-HC StoreVirtual and 200-HC EVO:RAIL (different models).

Today I got an email from HPE, which has informed me of the imminent end of support for HPE Data Protector 7.0x 8.0x. As of June 30, 2016, HPE will offer no new updates or patches for Data Protector 7.0x and 8.0x. This means that

• Telephone and email support
• new security updates, and
• new product updates

will be phased out. The self-help support will be continued until June 30, 2018. Self-help includes access to the knowledge base, current patches and access to known problems.

Last year in December, I updated the first customer from HPE Data Protector 9.04 to 9.05. Immediately after the first tests I noticed, that backups were made using the NBDSSL transport. I expected that the SAN transport would be used, because the prerequisites were met and it has worked until the update. I opened a case at the HPE support und I was advised to install the hotfix QCIM2A65619. With this hotfix, several files were replaced:

The Virtual Environment Integration (VE Integration) provides protection of VMs in virtual server environments. It is used o integrate HPE Data Protector with various virtualization environments, currently VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. For Citrix XenServer is a script solution available. I will focus on VMware vSphere.

What is possible?

I took this table from the “HPE Data Protector 9.00 Integration Guide for Virtualization”.

Feature	VE Integration
Online backup	✓
Crash-consistent backup	✓
Application-consistent backup	✓
Granularity	vmdk, vmx
Full/ Incremental/ Differential	✓/ ✓/ ✓
Support for changed block tracking (CBT)	✓
Where does the Data Protector component need to be installed?	backup host
Extra licenses needed	1x On-Line Extension per ESXi host

As you can see, Data Protector offers all you need to create a crash-consistent backup of your VMs. HPE Data Protector relies on the VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Data Protection (formerly known as VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection or VADP). Data Protector has to use the same API as Veeam, CommVault Simpana or any other product that can be used to backup VMs in a VMware vSphere environment. Therefore, most software products offer the same features.

Today I had a customer call, where a Exchange 2010 backup repeatedly failed. HPE Data Protector was unable to create a differential or incremental backup. For each database, the following error was logged:

[Minor] From: OB2BAR_E2010_BAR@exchangeserver.domain.tld "MS Exchange 2010+ Server"  Time: 21.03.2016 20:00:27
[170:313] 	One or more copies of database DATABASE are already being backed up in a different session.

Interestingly, there was no other backup session running. But the night before, the backup jobs failed because of a network failure.

HPE Data Protector stores multiple backup objects on a single Catalyst store item. A backup object can be a volume, a mount point, a database or a virtual machine. You can have multiple backup objects per backup client. If your filesystem backup job has four backup clients, and each client has two volumes, the backup job will contain 8 backup objects. Another example is a single database of a Microsoft SQL or Oracle database server (instance).

Today, I was at a customer to prepare a two node vSphere cluster for some MS SQL server tests. Nothing fancy, just two HP ProLiant BL460c Gen9 blades and two virtual volumes from a HP 3PAR. Each blade had two 400 GB SSDs, two 64 GB M.2 SSDs and a 1 GB MicroSD card. Usually, I install ESXi to a SD card. In this case, a MicroSD card. The SSDs were dedicated for PernixData FVP. Although I saw the MicroSD card in the boot menu, ESXi doesn’t showed it as a installation target.

Sometimes you need to reset the ILO Administrator password. Sure, you can reboot the server, press F8 and then reset the Administrator password. If you have installed a HP customized ESXi image, then there is a much better way to reset the password: HPONCFG.

Check the /opt/hp/tools directory. You will find a binary called hponcfg.

~ # ls -l /opt/hp/tools/
total 5432
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 5129574 Oct 28 2014 conrep
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 108802 Oct 28 2014 conrep.xml
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 59849 Jan 16 2015 hpbootcfg
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 251 Jan 16 2015 hpbootcfg_esxcli
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 232418 Jul 14 2014 hponcfg
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 12529 Oct 31 2013 hptestevent
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 250 Oct 31 2013 hptestevent_esxcli

All you need is a simple XML file. You can use the VI editor or you can copy the necessary file with WinSCP to the root home directory on your ESXi host. I prefer VI. Change the directory to /opt/hp/tools. Then open the pwreset.xml.