Hpe

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.

Some days ago, I blogged about the new HP StoreOnce software release 3.13.0. This release included several fixes. One fix wasn’t mentioned by me, although it’s interesting.

• Fixed issue where Windows 2012 R2 built-in native backup was not supported with 3.12.x software (BZ 61232)

Windows Server Backup (WSB) is part of Windows Server since Windows Server 2008. WSB can create bare metal backups and recover those backups. The same applies to system state backups, file level backups, Hyper-V VMs, Exchange etc. Very handy for small environmens. Backup can be stored on disk or on a file share. With Server 2012, the file share must be SMB3 capable. So if it’s not a Windows file server, the NAS that offers the file share has to be SMB3 capable. This doesn’t apply to Windows Server 2008 (R2).

In January 2014 I wrote a blog post about network flooding because of Windows NLB clusters in unicast mode. Yesterday, Windows NLB, HP switches and I met again.

After moving a customers core network from HP 5400zl switches to two IRF stacks with HP 7506 switches, multiple Windows NLB clusters stopped working. Because the Windows NLB used multicast operation mode, it was instantly clear that the switches were the problem.

The explanation is easy: By default, a Comware based switch does not learn multicast MAC addresses. And because of this, the switch does not add them to the ARP table. And you can’t add static multicast MAC address entries. You have to disable the ARP entry check.

Since september 2015, the latest version of HP StoreOnce backup system software is available. The latest release 3.13.0 is available for HP StoreOnce VSA, 6500, B6200 multi-node and all single node systems running software version 3.x. This also applies to some D2D 2500, 4100 and 4300 single-node backup systems running software versions 2.x. Make sure that you take a look into customer notice c03729283 for details on performing the conversion.

This release comes with some nice enhancements, e.g.

Last week, my colleague Claudia and I have ported a HP ProVision configuration to HP Comware. Unexpectedly, it wasn’t routing or VLANs or OSPF that caused headaches, it was a Wake-on-LAN (WoL). Depending on the used tool, the magic packet (which wakes up the computer) is a broadcast (255.255.255.255) or a subnet-directed broadcast (e.g. 192.168.200.255). So it was important to know what tool the customer used.

This is how HP ProVision implements subnet-directed broadcasts:

Since monday I’m helping a customer to put two HP 3PAR StoreServ 7200c into operation. Both StoreServs came factory-installed with 3PAR OS 3.2.1 MU3, which is available since July 2015. Usually, the first thing you do is to deploy the 3PAR Service Processor (SP). These days this is (in most cases) a Virtual Service Processor (VSP). The SP is used to initialize the storage system. Later, the SP reports to HP and it’s used for maintenance tasks like shutdown the StoreServ, install updates and patches. There are only a few cases in which you start the Out-of-the-Box (OOTB) procedure of the StoreServ without having a VSP. I deployed two (one VSP for each StoreServ) VSPs, started the Service Processor Setup Wizard, entered the StoreServ serial number and got this message:

While I was playing with my shiny, new HP StoreOnce VSA in my lab, I noticed a curious behavior. I created a NAS share for some tests with Veeam Backup & Replication. Creating a new share is nothing fancy. You can create a share in two ways:

• using the GUI, or
• using the CLI

So I created a new share: