HP DL380 Gen9 question -- remove all drives and send to another identical server...
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Dear community!
We have a customer that have purchased our software. We deliver our software on a HP DL380 Gen9 that I have set up and installed OS and software on.
The customer have another supplier located close to us that also have supplied them with a piece of software on an identical type of server. This servers has been sent to Singapore for a test. When it arrived at the destination, all the 8 hard drives had disappeared... Now, they can of course have the machine returned to them and put in new drives and reinstall everything and ship it to the test site again. This will add weeks to the time spent and will be bad for our customer.
But, our customer suggested that this other supplier come to our premises with a set of drives and borrow our server in order to create RAID on the drives, install the OS and put in their software. Then they can ship only the drives to Singapore.
We have no problem with this solution seen from an administrative view. This will be helpful to our customer and this other supplier is no competitor of ours.
Now, what I am wondering about is this; if I power down our server and remove all the drives from the machine, am I risking running into problems of any kind? When this other party is done borrowing our server (or more preciely, our customer's machine) can I simply just put back our drives in the machine and everything will be like before? Will our RAID controller be confused about having the other new drives in the bays for a few hours? Will the drives that are shipped to Singapore actually work in their server there?
If we don't disrupt our server doing the above, this will be a solution that is a win-win-win situation. No problem for us, very good for our customer and very good for the other supplier
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@flomer said:
Now, what I am wondering about is this; if I power down our server and remove all the drives from the machine, am I risking running into problems of any kind? When this other party is done borrowing our server (or more preciely, our customer's machine) can I simply just put back our drives in the machine and everything will be like before? Will our RAID controller be confused about having the other new drives in the bays for a few hours? Will the drives that are shipped to Singapore actually work in their server there?
Yes, that should work just find. As long as it is the same hardware, including the same RAID controller, everything should work fine. Those SmartArray controllers are meant to have drives moved between them. This would be the same situation that you would face if you were to have a RAID controller fail and you need to move the drives to a replacement server.
Is this a Windows install? If so, Windows will need reactivated when moving between hardware as it will recognize the change of hardware.
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Sounds good! I am thinking it would be like this, but thought it was better to hear if anybody have experienced problems before promising to help the other guys out. Yes, it is Windows, but I assume the other company will have the necessary info to re-activate the OS on their machine. Thank you for your reply!
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One thing that should be mentioned... if this was virtualized you would fix both the activation issue and remove the need for all of this rigmarole. Just install anywhere (with the same hypervisor), then export the VM, ship it on DVD, a single hard drive, a big USB drive, copy over the Internet, whatever, and import it at the other site.
Faster, more reliable, the best practice way, avoiding a hardware install of an OS, no activation issues, repeatable, etc.
It sounds like this entire process, other than the stolen drives, is a result of not having virtualized.
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@scottalanmiller
I agree ;-). But, we are in the offshore industry, and our machine(s) are regarded as instrumentation, and our segment of the industry is ... slow changing. I think that what you say might one day be the case, though. We have other customers that are moving to VMs these days, but that is for our software doing calculations only. In this particular instance we are also in the area of collecting data, and this is the subsea segment, not topside. The cusomers are more conservative on the subsea side. -
@flomer said:
The cusomers are more conservative on the subsea side.
I'd argue that conservative is exactly what they are not. Running physical servers is liberal, reckless and a new SMB fear movement. It's anything but conservative. It's not how servers have been run traditional (virtualization has been standard for critical workloads since 1964), it's not industry best practice (virtualization has been best practice, when available, also since 1964) and not conservative in a risk perspective - running physical is totally just taking on risk without value, effectively flaunting that risk is not important and money can be thrown around.
I understand that a lot of industries do IT poorly, but I would never call it conservative. A conservative company would rely on traditional values and industry best practices from one perspective, and lower risk on the other. Skipping virtualization does neither.
Think of it as driving without a seatbelt. No one calls pointlessly reckless "conservative."
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OK, bad choice of words, then. Perhaps backwards would have been better ;-). Anyway, the VM layer will introduce a layer that will need a little bit of training, and it might seem more complicated to our customers. Perhaps I will try to suggest we go virtual on our next project. I guess there will be Hyper-V available for free with the WS 2012 OS, or am I wrong?
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@flomer said:
OK, bad choice of words, then. Perhaps backwards would have been better ;-).
Yes, much. I'm adamant about things like virtualization not being called conservative because terms like that change our mindset and excuse bad behaviour by making it sound like people who virtualize are hipsters or risky or something, which is not true. The term conservative empowers companies to do reckless things by pointing to terms like this and using it to show why they do that.
Conservative makes a company that feels risk averse feel like virtualization isn't needed, when the opposite is true - anyone concerned about server risk would do virtualization without exception.
It does far more than empower companies, it alters IT reactions to bad decisions. It makes it sound like there is a reasonable reason why a company throws money, time and reliability away without benefit. But it is not reasonable. And a case like this you are being burned by it already before even putting the machine into production!
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@flomer said:
. I guess there will be Hyper-V available for free with the WS 2012 OS, or am I wrong?
Hyper-V is, and always has been, completely free. It requires no OS and does not "come with" Windows, you can just go download Hyper-V on its own.
Every enterprise hypervisor is free. Xen, KVM, Hyper-V and VMware ESXi are completely free.
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@flomer said:
Anyway, the VM layer will introduce a layer that will need a little bit of training, and it might seem more complicated to our customers. ?
Which means that having a server at all is far beyond their ability to support. If virtualization is complex, why do they accept RAID? That is way more complex.
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Well, RAID is often a requirement, and will be specified in the functional description. The idea is of course that it adds to the uptime, and that a failed drive does not make the "instrument" usable. Then again, when a drive fails it will most probably go unnoticed (the server is isolated and out of our reach), and it might perhaps be noticed if service personnel from our company is on the premises for other reasons. We are quite appalled by how our customer treats some of this equipment (some never take back-ups), but it's difficult for us to change this. Our servers are often small add-ons to tons of steel that make up the rest of the multi-million dollar deliveries. The value of our systems (production monitoring) is often not realized until after the field is in production.
But, seriously, how would you go about installing the hypervisor. On an internal SATA-DOM or USB, and who will administer the hypervisor. We are often only allotted an IP-address. I can see that introducing the hypervisor with an IP in addition will make the IT guyes freak out. Then again, perhaps not. They might be all for it. I will try to investigate this on our next project.
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@flomer said:
Well, RAID is often a requirement, and will be specified in the functional description. The idea is of course that it adds to the uptime...
Exactly my point, same reasoning that we use virtualization. The logic that makes one unreasonable to skip, does the same to the other.
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@flomer said:
. I can see that introducing the hypervisor with an IP in addition will make the IT guyes freak out. Then again, perhaps not. They might be all for it. I will try to investigate this on our next project.
Are these children running their IT? Are they freaking out about your ILO IP address currently? What's the difference?
If someone is freaking out about the most basic server fundamentals, you have really major issues to tackle.
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@flomer said:
But, seriously, how would you go about installing the hypervisor. On an internal SATA-DOM or USB, and who will administer the hypervisor.
Who administers the server currently? It would likely be the same person. Admining the hypervisor is a basic part of any piece of equipment being installed anywhere, so there should not be any process change and no new question here. Who is maintaining the hardware, the ILO, the OS, etc. currently?
Where you install depends on your goals, the products that you use, etc. If Hyper-V likely you will install to the main array. If VMware likely to the SD card.
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@flomer said:
I can see that introducing the hypervisor with an IP in addition will make the IT guyes freak out.
They should be freaking out that you haven't given them the IP addresses for the hypervisor and the OOB already.
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Things to consider in a discussion about virtualization....
- How are backups being handled now? Are you able to take images? Virtualization is not a requirement for good backups, but it is the general foundation of them.
- How are system updates and patches handled? Are you able to take system snapshots and roll back if something goes wrong? If not, isn't that really risky?
- How do you redeploy the software is something goes wrong? The issue that you are facing right now seems pretty dramatic. This would be a very simple issue had things been virtualized.
- How do you remotely access the system to support the software if anything goes wrong with Windows? What is your out of band management strategy without virtualization?
- How do you address driver stability, normally handled by virtualization?
- How do you handle new deployments, changes, OS updates, etc.?
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LOL, I'm guessing they aren't using iLo, Scott. That would require two ethernet cables.
I agree with Scott, assuming you have any influence at your company... now is a great time to look at your entire deployment process. Revamp it to include the requirement of iLo and a hypervisor just like I'm guessing that you require RAID.
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@Dashrender said:
LOL, I'm guessing they aren't using iLo, Scott. That would require two ethernet cables.
Why would they be paying for HP gear and skipping the stuff that makes it valuable? You lose tons of the value of HP gear if you disable their management and monitoring tools.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
LOL, I'm guessing they aren't using iLo, Scott. That would require two ethernet cables.
Why would they be paying for HP gear and skipping the stuff that makes it valuable? You lose tons of the value of HP gear if you disable their management and monitoring tools.
Because that's what the vendor sells. You can lead a horse to water...
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@scottalanmiller I will try to investigate this and try to get in touch with our customer's IT dept. early in the process for our next project. It will be interesting to see what will happen. Already it is quite puzzling that most customers want us to deliver the hardware, rather than just providing a server to us, or ask us for a VM. I guess that should be an indication the the instrumentation part of offshore business is a little "special" when it comes to these things.
