Work in progress!

       Hi All,

Today, we started to remove our last Cisco HW from our lab! Well not for long, as we will still use it to troubleshoot some interoperability between Sophos UTM-9 and Cisco implementations, but I must say that our UTM-9 does offer so much more that that ugly Cisco box and the cherry on top of the cake is that we can run it virtualized or on one of our HP Servers!

I would like to congratulate our internal colleagues responsible for the Microsoft Business Development as we have just achieved Gold Distribution status.

Our Lab (Hardware)

1x HP ProLiant DL380G8p
2x HP ProLiant DL380G7
3x HP ProLiant DL380G5
2x HP ProLiant DL320g6
2x HP Lefthand P4500
1x HP StoreServ 7200 (SAS & SATA w/ Dual Controller)
1x HP StoreOnce D2Di
2x HP SAN Switches
1x HP 5308xl Switch (Core)
2x HP 3800 Switches (iSCSI Switches)
1x HP 2810 Switch (Management Switch)
1x HP 2524 Switch (iLO Switch)

A massive lab and a lot of planning on it for our customers/resellers.

Feel free to contact your Account Executive to learn on how you can benefit from our lab. 

Tomorrow we will start again with the HP #StoreVirtual and vCenter vSRM setup as we decided to start from scratch once again to have a clean environment.

As well tomorrow we will be finalizing the setup of DP 7.x with StoreOnce SW Gateways and StoreOnce Appliances, with integration with vSphere.

We are also implementing a Load Balancer to enhance our upcoming exchange setup and web-servers and we will be adding on to our UTM-9 as well the endpoint protection.

Picture 1 - illustrates our VPN HTML5 Connection (Sophos UTM-9 on ProLiant)

Picture 2 - illustrates our current setup (partial) / vCenter & Infra Apps running over iSCSI (Windows Gateway) from our 3PAR StorServ 7200

Picture 3 - Illustrates our HP StoreServ serving our VMware Cluster with VMs

We will now be kicking in Adaptive Optimization to have the StoreOnce Gateways and Fileservers storing their cold data on our SATA group and the OS and Applications running on the SAS Tier - Obviously all running with full autonomy.

Later on the setup we will be implementing as well:

- Peer Motion between #StoreVirtual & #VSA
- Virtual Desktops (W2012 RDS & VMware View) & HP Thin Clients
- BOYD with HP ElitePads & Sophos MDM
- Full Sophos UTM-9
- Hyper-V Cluster with SC2012
- Data Protector 7.x
- MS SQL on 3PAR
- Exchange 2013 on Hyper-V & VMware (Hybrid Environment - Single Setup)
- Hyper-V Replication
- VMware SRM

We are open to configuration suggestions BUT all the HW Platform will be HP and only HP :-)

Feel free to contact us, should you wish to have remote access and to discuss.

Will keep you posted

Regards,

Nuno Fernandes | IT Architect | @nmiguelrf | www.systec.com.mt/enterprise

HP StoreServ 7200 + HP VirtualSystems + HP StoreOnce & Microsoft

Hi All,

Welcome to my blog!

I will be using this space to share our work with technology focusing on HP Enterprise Systems, VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Microsoft Business Apps, Data Protection and business continuity. All HW will be based on HP ProLiants/3PAR StoreServ 7200/HP StoreVirtual/HP StoreOnce/HP Network & HP Data Protector - Hope that this will be helpful and feel free to engage to discuss further setups, share ideas and architectures to better server our customers :-)

Keep Well and Enjoy my 1st blog :-)

This is a VM generating traffic on our VirtualSystem Cluster – (RDS VM) -> ESXTOP with four paths and RR per iSCSI MSFT Target being provided by our iscsisrv (still miss to create some load-balancing) and a cluster service to failover the 3PAR VV Disks in cause of hw issues on the current node!

I am positively surprised that the conversion from 3PAR TP VV via FC to a Windows 2012 Storage Server (DL380G5) and then formatted in NTFS 64K and then providing VHDs and being exported as iSCSI Targets, that VMware/VM do not register any significant latency nor any crazy WSS HW resource utilization! A good alternative to expand the lifetime of existent servers to shift them around.

I will be soon introducing as well iSCSI D2D Backup via DP7.x and I will keep you posted

This is our iSCSI Server bridging the iSCSI Targets to our VirtualSystem VMware Cluster and getting direct access to the 3PAR

Interesting to note is that our iSCSI GW Server, does not seem to have a big burden to export the 3PAR Volumes (thin provisioned on Raid6) over iSCSI (2x 1GbE) to our VMware Cluster and providing it with 4 available paths per target with RR .. this is a 3 to 4 year old server J

 

 

I will keep on publishing our lab results and how HP Technology is the best suited to run VMware/Microsoft Virtualization Platforms and any Microsoft workload being protected by HP Data Protector & StoreOnce technology and powered by HP Networks.

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Nuno Fernandes |  IT Architect | @nmiguelrf