HPE Archives

VMware ESXi Boot Failure from USB or SD Card with HPE iLO Amplifier and InfoSight

Feb 182019

Unable to boot ESXi from USB or SD Card on HPE Proliant Server

After installing HPE iLO Amplifier on your network and updating iLO 4 firmware to 2.60 or 2.61, you may notice that your HPE Proliant Servers may fail to boot ESXi from a USB drive or SD-Card.

This was occuring on 2 ESXi Hosts. Both were HPE Proliant DL360p Gen8 Servers. One server was using an internal USB drive for ESXi, while the other was using an HPE branded SD Card.

The issue started occuring on both hosts after a planned InfoSight implementation. Both hosts iLO controllers firmware were upgraded to 2.61, iLO Amplifier was deployed (and the servers added), and the amplifier was connected to an HPE InfoSight account.

Update – May 24th 2019: As an HPE partner, I have been working with HPE, the product manager, and development team on this issue. HPE has provided me with a fix to test that I have been able to verify fully resolves this issue! Stay tuned for more information!

Update – June 5th 2019: Great news! As Bob Perugini (WW Product Manager at HPE) put it: “HPE is happy to announce that this issue has been fixed in latest version of iLO Amplifier Pack, v1.40. To download iLO Amplifier Pack v1.40, go to http://www.hpe.com/servers/iloamplifierpack and click “download”.” Scroll to the bottom of the post for more information!

Please see below for errors:

Errors

Error loading /s.v00
 Compressed MD5: 00000000000000000000000000
 Decompressed MD5: 00000000000000000000000000
 Fatal error: 8 (Device Error)

Error mboot.c32 attempted DOS system call

mboot.c32: attempted DOS system call INT 21 0d00 E8004391
 boot:

Symptoms

This issue may occur intermittently, on the majority of boots, or on all boots. Re-installing ESXi on the media, as well as replacing the USB/SD Card has no effect. Installation will be successful, however you the issue is still experiences on boot.

HPE technical support was unable to determine the root of the issue. We found the source of the issue and reported it to HPE technical support and are waiting for an update.

The Issue and Fix

This issue occurs because the HPE iLO Amplifier is running continuous server inventory scans while the hosts are booting. When one inventory completes, it restarts another scan.

The following can be noted:

iLO Amplifier inventory percentage resets back to 0% and starts again numerous times during the server boot
Inventory scan completes, only to restart again numerous times during the server boot
Inventory scan resets back to 0% during numerous different phases of BIOS initialization and POST.

HPe iLO Amplifier Inventory — HPE iLO Amplifier Inventory

We noticed that once the HPE iLO Amplifier Virtual Machine was powered off, not only did the servers boot faster, but they also booted 100% succesfully each time. Powering on the iLO Amplifier would cause the ESXi hosts to fail to boot once again.

I’d also like to note that on the host using the SD-Card, the failed boot would actually completely lock up iLO, and would require physical intervention to disconnect and reconnect the power to the server. We were unable to restart the server once it froze (this did not happen to the host using the USB drive).

There are some settings on the HPE iLO amplifier to control performance and intervals of inventory scans, however we noticed that modifying these settings did not alter or stop the issue, and had no effect.

As a temporary workaround, make sure your iLO amplifier is powered off during any maintenance to avoid hosts freezing/failing to boot.

To fully resolve this issue, upgrade your iLO Amplifier to the latest version (1.40 as of the time of this update). The latest version can be downloaded at: http://www.hpe.com/servers/iloamplifierpack.

Update – April 10th 2019

I’ve attempted to try downgrading to the earliest supported iLo version 2.54, and the issue still occurs.

I also upgraded to the newest version 2.62 which presented some new issues.

On the first boot, the BIOS reported memory access issues on Processor 1 socket 1, then another error reporting memory access issues on Processor 1 socket 4.

I disconnected the power cables, reconnected, and restarted the server. This boot, the server didn’t even detect the bootable USB stick.

Again, after shutting down the iLo Amplifier, the server booted properly and the issue disappeared.

Update – May 24th 2019

As an HPE partner, I have been working with HPE, the product manager, and development team on this issue. HPE has provided me with a fix to test that I have been able to verify fully resolves this issue! Stay tuned for more information!

Update – June 5th 2019 – ITS FIXED!!!

Great news as the issue is now fixed! As Bob Perugini (WorldWide Product Manager at HPE) said it:

HPE is happy to announce that this issue has been fixed in latest version of iLO Amplifier Pack, v1.40.
To download iLO Amplifier Pack v1.40, go to http://www.hpe.com/servers/iloamplifierpack and click “download”.

Here’s what’s new in iLO Amplifier Pack v1.40:
─ Available as a VMware ESXi appliance and as a Hyper-V appliance (Hyper-V is new)
─ VMware tools have been added to the ESXi appliance
─ Ability to schedule the time of the daily transmission of Active Health System (AHS) data to InfoSight
─ Ability to opt-in and allow the IP address and hostname of the server to be transmitted to InfoSight and displayed
─ Test connectivity button to help verify iLO Amplifier Pack has successfully connected to InfoSight
─ Allow user authentication credentials for the proxy server when connecting to InfoSight
─ Added ability to specify IP address or hostname for the HPE RDA connection when connection to InfoSight
─ Ability to send updated AHS data “now” for an individual server
─ Ability to stage firmware and driver updates to the iLO Repository and then deploy the staged updates at a later date or time (HPE Gen10 servers only)
─ Allow the firmware and driver updates of servers whose iLO has been configured in CNSA (Commercial National Security Algorithm) mode (HPE Gen10 servers only)

HPE MSA 2040 Unresponsive, Dead, or Failed Controller, Controller won’t boot

HPE, MSA 18 Responses »

Nov 042018

This weekend I came across a big issue with my HPE MSA 2040 where one of the SAN controllers became unresponsive, and appeared to had failed because it would not boot.

It all started when I decided to clean the MSA SAN. I try to clean the components once or twice a year to remove dust and make sure it’s not getting all jammed up. Sometimes I’ll shut the entire unit down and remove the individual components, other times I’ll remove them while operating. Because of the redundancies and since I have two controllers, I can remove and clean each controller individually at separate times.

Please Note: When dusting equipment with fans, never allow the fans to spin up with compressed air as this can generate current which can damage components. Never allow compressed air flow to spin up fans.

After cleaning out the power supplies, it came time to clean the controllers.

The Problem

As always, I logged in to the SMU to shutdown controller A (storage). I shut it down, the blue LED illuminated it was safe for removal. I then proceeded to remove it, clean it, and re-insert it. The controller came back online, and ownership of the applicable disk groups were successfully moved back. Controller A was now completed successfully. I continued to do the same for controller B: I logged in to shutdown controller B (storage). It shut down just like controller A, the blue LED removable light illuminated. I was able to remove it, clean it, and re-insert it.

However, controller B did not come back online.

After inserting controller B, the status light was flashing (as if it was booting). I waited 20 minutes with no change. The SMU on controller B was responding to HTTPS requests, however you could not log on due to the error “system is initializing”. SSH was functioning and you could log in and issue commands, however any command to get information would return “Please wait while this information is pulled from the MC controller”, and ultimately fail. The SMU on controller A would report a controller fault on controller B, and not provide any other information (including port status on controller B).

I then tried to re-seat the controller with the array still running. Gave it plenty of time with no effect.

I then removed the failed controller, shutdown the unit, powered it back on (only with controller A), and re-inserted Controller B. Again, no effect.

The Fix

At this point I’m thinking the controller may have failed or died during the cleaning process. I was just about to call HPE support for a replacement until I noticed the “Power LED” light inside of the failed controller would flash every 5 seconds while removed.

This made me start to wonder if there was an issue writing the cache to the compact flash card, or if the controller was still running off battery power but had completely frozen.

I tried these 3 things on the failed controller while it was unplugged and removed:

I left the controller untouched for 1 hour out of the array (to maybe let it finish whatever it was doing while on battery power)
There’s an unlabeled button on the back of the controller. As a last resort (thinking it was a reset button), I pressed and held it for 20 seconds, waited a minute, then briefly pressed it for 1 second while it was out of the unit.
I removed the Compact Flash card from the controller for 1 minute, then re-inserted it. In hoping this would fail the cache copy if it was stuck in the process of writing cache to compact flash.

I then re-inserted the controller, and it booted fine! It was not functioning and working (and came up very fast). Looking at the logs, it has no record of what occurred between the first shutdown, and final boot. I hope this post helps someone else with the same issue, it can save you a support ticket, and time with a controller down.

Disclaimer

PLEASE NOTE: I could not find any information on the unlabeled button on the controller, and it’s hard to know exactly what it does. Perform this at your own risk (make sure you have a backup). Since I have 2 controllers, and my MSA 2040 was running fine on Controller A, I felt comfortable doing this, as if this did reset controller B, the configuration would replicate back from controller A. I would not do this in a single controller environment.

Update – 24 Hours later

After I got everything up and running, I checked the logs of the unit and couldn’t find anything on controller B that looked out of ordinary. However, 24 hours later, I logged back in and noticed some new events showed up from the day before (from the day I had the issues):

You’ll notice the event log with severity error:

Recovery from internal processor fault detected on controller.
Code 549

One thing that’s very odd is that I know for a fact the time is wrong on the error severity log entry, this could be due to the fact we had a daylight savings time change last night at midnight. Either way it appears that it finally did detect that the Storage controller was in an error state and logged it, but it still would have been nice for some more information.

On a final note, the unit has been running perfectly for over 24 hours.

Update – April 2nd 2019

Well, in March a new firmware update was released for the MSA. I went to upgrade and the same issue as above occurred. During the firmware upgrade, at one point of the firmware update process a step had failed and repeated 4 times until successful.

The firmware update log (below was repeated):

Updating system configuration files
System configuration complete
Loading SC firmware.
STATUS: Updating Storage Controller firmware.
Waiting 5 seconds for SC to shutdown.
Shutdown of SC successful.
Sending new firmware to SC.
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 6263505
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 5935825
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 5608145
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 5280465
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 4952785
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 4625105
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 4297425
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 3969745
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 3642065
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 3314385
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 2986705
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 2659025
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 2331345
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 2003665
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 1675985
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 1348305
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 1020625
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 692945
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 365265
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 37585
Waiting for Storage Controller to complete programming.
Please wait...
Please wait...
Please wait...
Please wait...
Storage Controller has completed programming.
Got an error (138) on firmware packet
CAPI error: Firmware Update failed. Controller needs to reboot.
Waiting 5 seconds for SC to shutdown.
Shutdown of SC successful.
Sending new firmware to SC.
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 6263505
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 5935825
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 5608145
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 5280465
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 4952785
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 4625105
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 4297425
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 3969745
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 3642065
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 3314385
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 2986705
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 2659025
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 2331345
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 2003665
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 1675985
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 1348305
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 1020625
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 692945
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 365265
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 37585
Waiting for Storage Controller to complete programming.
Please wait...
Please wait...
Storage Controller has completed programming.
Got an error (138) on firmware packet
CAPI error: Firmware Update failed. Controller needs to reboot.
Waiting 5 seconds for SC to shutdown.
Shutdown of SC successful.
Sending new firmware to SC.
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 6263505
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 5935825
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 5608145
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 5280465
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 4952785
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 4625105
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 4297425
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 3969745
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 3642065
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 3314385
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 2986705
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 2659025
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 2331345
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 2003665
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 1675985
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 1348305
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 1020625
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 692945
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 365265
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 37585
Waiting for Storage Controller to complete programming.
Please wait...
Please wait...
Storage Controller has completed programming.
Got an error (138) on firmware packet
CAPI error: Firmware Update failed. Controller needs to reboot.
Waiting 5 seconds for SC to shutdown.
Shutdown of SC successful.
Sending new firmware to SC.
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 6263505
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 5935825
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 5608145
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 5280465
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 4952785
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 4625105
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 4297425
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 3969745
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 3642065
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 3314385
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 2986705
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 2659025
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 2331345
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 2003665
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 1675985
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 1348305
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 1020625
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 692945
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 365265
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 37585
Waiting for Storage Controller to complete programming.
Please wait...
Please wait...
Storage Controller has completed programming.
Updating SC Image:Remaining size 0
Storage Controller has been successfully updated.
STATUS: Current CPLD firmware is up-to-date.
CPLD update not required.
==========================================
Software Component Load Summary:
MC Software:    SUCCESSFUL
SC Software:    SUCCESSFUL
EC Software:    NOT ATTEMPTED
CPLD Software:  NOT ATTEMPTED
==========================================

During the Storage Controller restarting process, the controller never came back up. I removed the controller 1 hour, re-inserted and the above fix did not work. I then tried it after 2 hours of disconnection.

At this point I contacted HPE, who is sending a replacement controller.

The following day (12 hours of controller removed), I re-inserted it again and it actually booted up, was working with the new firmware, and then did a PFU (Partner Firmware Update) of controller A.

While it is working now, I’m still going to replace the controller as I believe something is not functioning correctly.

Procedure for restoring a VM from SAN Storage LUN snapshot

ESXi, iSCSI, MSA, VMware, vSphere No Responses »

Aug 272018

So, what happens in a worst-case scenario where your backup system fails, you don’t have any VM snapshots, and the last thing standing in the way of complete data loss is your SAN storage systems LUN snapshots?

Well, first you fire whoever purchased and implemented the backup system, then secondly you need to start restoring the VM (or VMs) from your SAN LUN snapshots.

While I’ve never had to do this in the past (all the disaster recovery solutions I’ve designed and sold have been tested and function), I’ve always been curious what the process is and would be like. Today I decided to try it out and develop a procedure for restoring a VM from SAN Storage LUN snapshot.

For this test I pretended a VM was corrupt on my VMware vSphere cluster and then restored it to a previous state from a LUN snapshot on my HPE MSA 2040 (identical for the HPE MSA 2050, and MSA 2052) Dual Controller SAN.

To accomplish the restore, we’ll need to create a host mapping on the SAN for the LUN snapshot to a new LUN number available to the hosts. We then need to add and mount the VMFS volume (residing on the snapshot) to the host(s) while assigning it a new signature and then vMotion the VM from the snapshot’s VMFS to original datastore.

Important Notes (Read first):

When mounting a VMFS volume from a SAN snapshot, you MUST RE-SIGNATURE THE SNAPSHOT VMFS volume. Not doing so can cause problems.
The snapshot cannot be mapped as read only, VMFS volumes must be marked as writable in order to be mounted on ESXi hosts.
You must follow the proper procedure to gracefully dismount and detach the VMFS volume and storage device before removing the snapshot’s host mapping on the SAN.
We use Storage vMotion to perform a high-speed move and recovery of the VM. If you’re not licensed for Storage vMotion, you can use the datastore file browser and copy/move from the snapshot VMFS volume to live production VMFS volume, however this may be slower.
During this entire process you do not touch, modify, or change any settings on your existing active production LUNs (or LUN numbers).
Restoring a VM from a SAN LUN snapshot will restore a crash consistent copy of the VM. The VM when recovered will believe a system crash occurred and power was lost. This is NOT a graceful application consistent backup and restore.
Please read your SAN documentation for the procedure to access SAN snapshots, and create host mappings. With the MSA 2040 I can do this live during production, however your SAN may be different and your hosts may need to be powered off and disconnected while SAN configuration changes are made.
Pro tip: You can also power on and initialize the VM from the snapshot before initiating the storage vMotion. This will allow you to get production services back online while you’re moving the VM from the snapshot to production VMFS volumes.
I’m not responsible if you damage, corrupt, or cause any damage or issues to your environment if you follow these procedures.

We are assuming that you have already either deleted the damaged VM, or removed it from your inventory and renamed the VMs folder on the live VMFS datastore to change the name (example, renaming the folder from “SRV01” to “SRV01.bad”. If you renamed the damaged VM, make sure you have enough space for the new restored VM as well.

Procedure:

Mount the VMFS volume on the LUN snapshot to the ESXi host(s)

Identify the VM you want to recover, write it down.
Identify the datastore that the VM resides on, write it down.
Identify the SAN and identify the LUN number that the VMFS datastore resides on, write it down.
Identify the LUN Snapshot unique name/id/number and write it down, confirm the timestamp to make sure it will contain a valid recovery point.
Log on to the SAN and create a host mapping to present the snapshot (you recorded above) to the hosts using a new and unused LUN number.
Log on to your ESXi host and navigate to configuration, then storage adapters.
Select the iSCSI initator and click the “Rescan Storage Adapters” button to rescan all iSCSI LUNs.
VMware ESXi Host Rescan Storage Adapter
Ensure both check boxes are checked and hit “Ok”, wait for the scan to complete (as shown in the “Recent Tasks” window.
VMware ESXi Host Rescan Storage Adapter Window for VMFS Volume and Devices
Now navigate to the “Datastores” tab under configuration, and click on the “Create a new Datastore” button as shown below.
VMware ESXi Host Add Datastore Window
Continue with “VMFS” selected and select continue.
In the next window, you’ll see your existing datastores, as well as your new datastore (from the snapshot). You can leave the “Datastore name” as is since this value will be ignored. In this window you’re going to select the new VMFS datastore from the snapshot. Make sure you confirm this by looking at the LUN number, as well as the value under “SnapshotVolume”. It is critical that you select the snapshot in this window (it should be the new LUN number you added above).
Select next and continue.
On the next window “Mount Option”, you need to change the radio button to and select “Assign a new signature”. This is critical! This will assign a new signature to differentiate it from your existing real production datastore so that the ESXi hosts don’t confuse it.
Continue with the wizard and complete the mount process. At this point ESXi will resignture the VMFS volume and rename it to “snap-OriginalVolumeNameHere”.
You can now browse the VMFS datastore residing on the LUN snapshot and do anything you’d normally be able to do with a normal datastore.

Copy/Move/vMotion the VM from the snapshot VMFS volume to your production VMFS volume

Note: The next steps are only if you are licensed for storage vMotion. If you aren’t you’ll need to use the copy or move function in the file browsing area to copy or move the VMs to your live production VMFS datastores:

Now we’ll go to the vCenter/ESXi host storage area in the web client, and using the “Files” tab, we’ll browse the snapshots VMFS datastore that we just mounted.
Locate the folder for the VM(s) you want to recover, open the folder, right click on the vmx file for the VM and select “Register VM”. Repeat this for any of the VMs you want to recover from the snapshot. Complete the wizard for each VM you register and add it to a host.
Go back to you “Hosts and VMs” view, you’ll now see the VMs are added.
Select and right click on the VM you want to move from the snapshot datastore to your production live datastore, and select “Migrate”.
In the vMotion migrate wizard, select “Change Storage only”.
Continue to the wizard, and storage vMotion the VM from the snapshot VMFS to your production VMFS volume. Wait for the vMotion to complete.
After the storage vMotion is complete, boot the VM and confirm everything is functioning.

Gracefully unmount, detach, and remove the snapshot VMFS from the ESXi host, and then remove the host mapping from the SAN

On each of your ESXi hosts that have access to the SAN, go to the “Datastores” section under the ESXi hosts configuration, right click on the snapshot VMFS datastore, and select “Unmount”. You’ll need to repeat this on each ESXi host that may have automounted the snapshot’s VMFS volume.
On each of your ESXi hosts that have access to the SAN, go to the “Storage Devices” section under the ESXi hosts configuration and identify (by LUN number) the “disk” that is the snapshot LUN. Select and highlight the snapshot LUN disk, select “All Actions” and select “Detach”. Repeat this on each host.
Double check and confirm that the snapshot VMFS datastore (and disk object) have been unmounted and detached from each ESXi host.
You can now log in to your SAN and remove the host mapping for the snapshot-to-LUN. We will not longer present the snapshot LUN to any of the hosts.
Back to the ESXi hosts, navigate to “Storage Adapters”, select the “iSCSI Initiator Adapter”, and click the “Rescan Storage Adapters”. Repeat this for each ESXi host.
VMware ESXi Host Rescan Storage Adapter
You’re done!

HPE Moonshot – The absolute definition of high-density, software defined infrastructure

Compute, HPE, Moonshot 1 Response »

Aug 222018

HPE Moonshot

I had the pleasure of playing with a fully loaded HPE Moonshot 1500 Chassis, and an HPe Edgeline EL4000 Converged Edge System last month during my visit to HPe Headquarters in Toronto, Ontario. I like to think of this thing as the answer for high-density anything and everything!

HPE Moonshot 1500 Chassis

I’ve known about the HPE Moonshot portfolio for some time, however I didn’t understand how mammoth one of these chassis’ are until I saw it performing in real life.

HPE Moonshot 1500 Chassis with 45 Cartridges

The HPE Moonshot 1500 Chassis supports up to 45 cartridges, and up to 4 SoC (System on Chip) OS instances per cartridge for a total of 180 OS instances in a 4.3U (5U for 1 x 1500 Chassis or 13U for 3 x 1500 Chassis) sized footprint. The chassis also supports up to 2 switches and 2 uplink modules in addition to the 45 cartridges.

Prime uses for HPE Moonshot 1500 (remember, high-density everything):

VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure via VMware or Microsoft)
HDI (Hosted Desktop Infrastructure via Citrix Provisioning Server)
Server consolidation and Virtualization
SDDC (Software Defined Data Center)
HPC (High Performance Computing, both Virtualized and Non-Virtualized workloads)
Energy Efficient Compute
EUC (End User Computing – Software defined end user desktops without virtualization)
Video Transcoding
Analytics and Interpritation
IoT and AI
Custom workloads

As you can see, you can virtually load up whatever you’d like on it that requires a CPU (HPE Moonshot can run both x86 and ARM architectures depending on which cartridges are utilized).

The chassis is monitored and managed via the HPE Moonshot 1500 Chassis Management module and the HPE Moonshot Provisioning Manager.

HPE Edgeline EL4000 Converged Edge System

The HPE Edgeline EL4000 was designed (you probably guessed it) for the edge. Whether it be the enterprise edge, media edge, or IoT edge, the EL4000 is a perfect fit.

HPE Edgeline EL4000 Converged Edge System

This bad boy supports up to 4 HPE Proliant Server Cartridge (m510 or m710x) compute nodes in a 1U package. It also supports up to 4 PCIe cards, or 4 PXIe modules assignable to any of the compute modules.

Prime uses for the HPE Edgeline EL4000:

Edge Computing (AI, IoT EDGE)
ROBO (Remote Office Branch Office)
Server Consolidation and Virtualization (ROBO)
VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure)
HDI (Hosted Desktop Infrastructure)
Video Transcoding
Industrial applications (Machine monitoring, Condition Monitoring)
Edgeline data analytics
Industrial/Manufacturing Quality Control and Quality Assurance (Video Analytics and Interpretation)
SMB Applications

The El4000 has iLo (Integrated Lights Out) built in, and provides management and monitoring. This unit also supports GPU accelerator/compute cards such as the Nvidia P4 Graphics Accelerator (specifically an Nvidia Tesla P4 8GB Computational PCIe card).

HPE Moonshot Cartridges

With the flexibility of different cartridges, along with Moonshot being software defined, you can highly customize whatever workload you may be running.

HPE Proliant m800 Moonshot Cartridge Front View

HPE Proliant m800 Moonshot Cartridge Side View

The following cartridges are currently available for the HPE Moonshot platform:

HPE Proliant m710p – Server or Desktop Virtualization, includes Intel Iris Pro P6300 graphics for VDI deployments (supported by VMware vSphere for vDGA passthrough and vSGA) or video transcoding.
HPE Proliant m710x – Server or Desktop Virtualization, includes Intel Iris Pro P580 graphics for VDI deployments (supported by VMware vSphere for vDGA passthrough and vSGA) or video transcoding.
HPE Proliant m700p – Designed for high-performance Citrix Mobile Workspaces (high-density EUC) for 4 desktops per cartridge with AMD Radeon HD 8000 graphics.
HPE Proliant m510 – Features the Xeon D processor targeting high performance, AI, analytics, machine learning, and IoT workloads.

As you can see there is quite some flexibility as far as the cartridges you can roll out. I get really excited when I think of VDI with Moonshot just because of the fact that the Intel Iris Pro P580, and P6300 are fully supported on VMware’s HCL for vDGA and vSGA graphics for vSphere 6.5 and 6.7.

There are also retired/discontinued cartridges (such as the HPE Proliant m800) which are beyond the scope of this blog post.

HPE Moonshot Networking

On the HPe Moonshot 1500 Chassis, networking is handled inside of the chassis via 1 or 2 network switch modules and uplink modules. You’ll then connect the uplinks from the uplink modules to your real physical network. You can connect to your network via QSFP+ or SFP+ connections using DAC (direct attached cables) or fiber cables with transceivers at speeds of 40Gb or 10Gb.

The Moonshot 1500 chassis supports the following switch modules:

Moonshot-45Gc Switch – 1Gb Switch connectivity for m510, m510-16c, m710x cartridges and works with the Moonshot 6 x SFP+ Uplink Module
Moonshot-45XGc Switch – 1Gb or 10Gb Switch connectivity for m510, m510-16c, m710x cartridges and works with the Moonshot 16 x SFP+ Uplink Module or the 4 QSFP+ Uplink Module
Moonshot-180XGc Switch – 1Gb or 10Gb Switch connectivity for m510, m510-16c, m710x cartridges, and 1Gb Switch connectivity for m700p and works with the Moonshot 16 x SFP+ Uplink Module or the 4 QSFP+ Uplink Module

On the HPE Edgeline EL4000, networking is handled via 2 x 10Gb SFP+ switched version, or a 8 x 10Gb QSFP+ pass-thru version. The unit also has a dedicated 1Gb RJ45 port for HPE iLo connectivity.

HPE Moonshot Storage

Each cartridge can contain it’s own dedicated storage up to 2TB. This is perfect for a HPE StoreVirtual VSA deployment or even basic direct attached storage. You can also connect HPE Moonshot to an HPE 3PAR SAN or an HPE Apollo 4500 storage system via the 10Gb network Fabric.

There’s a few options as to how you can plan your storage deployment with Moonshot:

DAS – Direct Attached Storage (in cartridge)
HPE 3PAR SAN or HPE Apollo 4500 Storage System
iSCSI/NFS (May or may not be supported depending on your workload)
VMware vSAN (May or may not be supported/certified)

As you can see, there’s quite a few options and possibilities as far as your storage deployment goes.

HPE Moonshot Pictures

Here’s some additional photos of the unit.

HPe Moonshot at HPe Center of Excellence

HPE Moonshot 1500 Chassis opened and running

HPE Moonshot 1500 Chassis with Cartridges

And remember, if you’re interested in the HPE Moonshot product or any other products or solutions in HPE’s portfolio, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me or my company (Digitally Accurate Inc.) for more information as we are an HPE partner and design/configure/sell HPE solutions!

VMware vSphere 6.7 released! Here’s the download link…

ESXi, HPE, VMware, vSphere 21 Responses »

Apr 172018

With the news of VMware vSphere 6.7 being released today, a lot of you are looking for the download links for the 6.7 download (including vSphere 6.7, ESXi 6.7, etc…). I couldn’t find it myself, but after doing some scouring through alternative URLs, I came across the link.

VMware vSphere 6.7 Download Link