Server

After a reboot, a VMware ESXi 6.7 U3 told me that he has no compatible NICs. Fun fact: Right before the reboot everything was fine.

The ILO also showed no NICs. Unfortunately, I wasn’t onsite to pull the blade server and put it back in. But there is a way to do this “virtually”.

You have to connect to the IP address of the Onboard Administrator via SSH. Then issue the reset server command with the bay of the server you want to reset and an argument.

I’ve got several mails and comments about this topic. It looks like that the latest ESXi 6.7 updates are causing some trouble on HPE ProLiant Gen10 servers.

I’ve blogged about recurring host hardware sensor state alarm messages some weeks ago. A customer noticed them after an update. Last week, I got the first comments under this blog post abot fan failure messages after applying the latest ESXi 6.7 updates. Then more and more customers asked me about this, because they got these messages too in their environment after applying the latest updates.

The downside of using WordPress is that many people use it. That makes WordPress a perfect target for attacks. I have some trouble with attacks, and one of the consequences is, that my web server crashes under load. The easiest way to solve this issue would be to ban those IP addresses. I use Fail2ban to protect some other services. So the idea of using Fail2ban to ban IP addresses, that are used for attacks, was obvious.

Some days ago, my colleague Claudia and I started to work on a new project: A greenfield deployment consisting of some well known building blocks: HPE ProLiant, HPE MSA, HPE Networking (now Aruba) and VMware vSphere. Nothing new for us, because we did this a couple times together. But this led us to the idea, to automate some tasks. Especially the configuration of the HPE ProLiants: Changing BIOS settings and configuring the iLO.

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a protocol for monitoring and configuration of network-attached devices. SNMP exposes data in the form of variables and values. These variables can then be queried or set. A query retrieves the value of a variable, a set operation assigns a value to a variable. The variables are organized in a hierarchy and each variable is identified by an object identifiers (OID). The management information base (MIB ) describes this hierarchy. MIB files (simple text files) contain metadata for each OID. These are necessary for the translation of a numeric OID into a human-readable format.  SNMP knows two devices types:

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 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 weeks ago, HP has published an updated version of their HP Service Pack for ProLiant (SPP). The SPP 2015.04.0 has added support for

• new HP ProLiant servers and options,
• support for Red Had Enterprise Linux 6.6, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12, VMware vSphere 5.5 U2 and (of course) VMware vSphere 6.0,
• HP Smart Update Manager v7.2.0 was added,
• the HP USB Key Utility for Windows v2.0.0.0 can now handle downloads greater than 4GB (important, because this release may not fit on a standard DVD media…)
• select Linux firmware components is now available in rpm format

In addition, the SPP covers two important customer advisories:

There’s a world below clouds and enterprise environments with thousands of VMs and hundered or thousands of hosts. A world that consists of maximal three hosts. I’m working with quite a few customers, that are using VMware vSphere Essentials Plus. Those environments consist typically of two or three hosts and something between 10 and 100 VMs. Just to mention it: I don’t have any VMware vSphere Essentials customer. I can’t see any benefit for buying these license. Most of these environments are designed for a lifeime of three to four years. After that time, I come again and replace it with new gear. I can’t remember any customer that upgraded his VMware vSphere Essentials Plus. Even if the demands to the IT infrastructure increases, the license stays the same. The hosts and storage gets bigger, but the requirements stays the same: HA, vMotion, sometimes vSphere Replication, often (vSphere API for) Data Protection. Maybe this is a german thing and customers outside of german are growing faster and invest more in their IT.