Over the next couple of weeks, Dell’s new OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution partner Inktank will host a series of four webinars providing a step by step walk through the cloud storage capabilities of Ceph. Ceph is ideal for the cloud as it combines object and block storage in one open source solution.

We will conduct one webinar per week, starting on January 17th (duration: 60 minutes).

As part of this series, Dell will be joining Inktank to host a webinar specifically on Ceph, Crowbar and OpenStack on January 24th. You can register to all four webinars or to those you are particularly interested in on the Inktank Webinar page. Please find below an overview over the topics covered:

#1 Webinar: Getting Started with Ceph
January 17, 2013
10:00AM PT, 12:00PM CT, 1:00PM ET
Register now

Join to learn:
• The architectural requirements of the Ceph Cluster
• The role of the core RADOS components
• What happens if an OSD fails
• How to spin up a cluster using a VM image
• What is required to expand the cluster

#2 Webinar: Intro to Ceph with OpenStack
January 24, 2013
10:00AM PT, 12:00PM CT, 1:00PM ET
Register now

During this webinar you will learn:
• What you need to consider for selecting the best cloud storage system
• Overview of the Ceph architecture and unique features and benefits
• Best practices in deploying cloud storage with Ceph and OpenStack

#3 Webinar: DreamHost Case Study: DreamObjects with Ceph
February 7, 2013
10:00AM PT, 12:00PM CT, 1:00PM ET
Register now

This webinar will discuss best practices and lessons learned in creating DreamObjects, including the need to manage scale, speed, monitoring, uptime, security and cost.

#4 Webinar: Advanced Features of the Ceph Distributed Storage System Delivered by Sage Weil, Ceph Creator
February 12,, 2013
10:00AM PT, 12:00PM CT, 1:00PM ET
Register now

Join to learn about the following advance features of Ceph:
• Deploying Ceph
• Enhance Deployment
• Block Devices

This webinar will focus on advanced features and configuration of Ceph. Attendees should have
a basic understanding and preferably hands-on experience with Ceph before attending this
webinar.

Looking forward to see you soon! In case you have any questions, feel free to contact us:

Jude Fitzgerald (Inktank)
Jude.Fitzgerald@inktank.com
@JudeFitzz

Rafael Knuth (Dell)
rafael_knuth@dellteam.com
@RafaelKnuth

In my last post, we discussed how the three EqualLogic hybrid iSCSI SAN arrays are positioned for different desktop virtualization use cases. In this post, we focus on VDI with EqualLogic hybrid blade array.

Dell EqualLogic PS-M4110XS arrays are half-height, double-wide hybrid blade arrays with five 400GB SSDs and nine 600GB 10K SAS drives for a total of 7.4 TB (raw) capacity. Even with its compact, modular design to fit within the blade chassis, the PS-M4110XS blade functions as a full EqualLogic iSCSI SAN array, with all the capabilities EqualLogic has become known for.

These hybrid arrays provide a blade form factor suitable for a comprehensive, self-contained VDI solution within a modular and compact blade enclosure. Together with Dell PowerEdge™ blade servers and Dell Force10™ blade switches, EqualLogic PS-M4110XS hybrid blade arrays create “converged” data-center-in-a-box VDI deployments.

What does it mean? Why does it matter?

For a thorough answer to these questions, check out this recent paper from the Taneja Group.

In a nutshell:

• The entire VDI solution – compute, networking and storage – delivered within the blade chassis. No external switching for storage, very easy to manage, a whole lot less cabling – an extremely space-efficient, dense, cost-effective VDI solution.

• Unlike other “converged” solutions in the market (which are essentially a pre-tested racking and stacking of the infrastructure components), you can achieve a true “converged” solution where you can reliably run SAN and LAN traffic together through the same switch with a QoS guarantee. DCB-enabled Dell Force10 MXL switches and EqualLogic PS-M4110XS hybrid blade arrays make this a very attractive converged VDI solution that has a very low dollars-per-desktop cost.

The other question we get pretty much in every customer conversation involving VDI with PS-M4110XS arrays is this: “What is the optimal VDI configuration for the solution – blade servers, blade switching and blade arrays together – and not just for the hybrid blade storage.”

The Taneja Group paper mentioned above has some sample solution architectures for this VDI solution.

In one use case, we can have two hybrid PS-M4110XS arrays for a total raw capacity of 14.8 TB per array group. As shown in Figure 1, that leaves room in the chassis for 12 x M620, two-socket, half-height server blades (see front panel view at top left of diagram), with 2 of those M620s dedicated to infrastructure and management. The middle and right columns show back panel views, including fans, power supplies, and the vertically oriented Fabric IO Modules. In the middle column scenario, DCB is enabled to converge LAN and SAN traffic; and in the right column, the LAN and SAN each run on a dedicated fabric.

Figure 1: Converged VDI solution with Dell blade servers, blade switches and blade storage

A converged infrastructure VDI solution with two hybrid PS-M4110XS arrays can support 800 to 1000 typical task worker desktops. (Of course, the exact mileage will vary depending on the VDI workload your environment is creating.) In this solution with two blade arrays and 12 x M620 blade servers (with 2 allotted for infrastructure and management), each M620 blade server can be used to support around 80 to 100 virtual desktops, depending on the application mix.

How about the performance of this converged VDI solution?

We have tested this VDI solution with PS-M4110XS hybrid blade arrays and some of the results are included in the Taneja Group paper. Figure 2 below shows the boot storm results for 450 desktops running on a single PS-M4110XS hybrid array (the full solution will have two of these).

Figure 2: Boot storm test: 450 desktops on one PS-M4110XS array

For full details, check out the Taneja Group paper.

This post was written by John Beckett, an engineer on the Dell Solutions Performance Anaylsis team 

All these questions and more can be answered by reading this whitepaper.  This resource will give you the tools and understanding you need to examine your PowerEdge server and ensure optimal performance.  In addition, the importance of NUMA locality is addressed with actual performance measurements that you may be able to extrapolate from.

The process of Linux core enumeration is covered thoroughly, and you will learn from the text and illustrations how common multi-socket platforms have their cores enumerated, as well as providing you with the utilities and knowledge you need to examine your own system and develop new best practices for optimal performance (see example below).

Finally, the concept of NUMA I/O is discussed.  What it means for you and how you can ensure better throughput and lower latency characteristics by keeping an eye on a few important elements.

The paper is full of additional references and links to more information around the tools and concepts that are discussed.

Learn firsthand about OpenStack, its challenges and opportunities, market adoption and Rackspace’s engagement in the community. My goal is to interview all 24 members of the OpenStack board, and I will post these talks sequentially at Dell TechCenter. In order to make these interviews easier to read, I structured them into my (subjectively) most important takeaways. Enjoy reading!

#1 Takeaway: The world wants an open cloud

Rafael: What are the key accomplishments of OpenStack so far?

Jim: First, the transition to the foundation. Setting up a foundation is a big move, and technically it removes OpenStack from Rackspace to the community, which attracts a large number of companies to the project. I think we should be proud of how the community comes together to work very well.

Second, two years ago OpenStack was more of a promise than a reality. We had a production grade object storage environment, but Nova, the compute project was at best a couple thousands lines of code. Here we are now 600,000 lines codes later with hundreds of contributors from nearly a hundred countries. It’s amazing to see the progress we made in maturing the product. At Rackspace, we’re using that code to power the world’s second largest public cloud … and there are a lot of diverse use cases such as MercadoLibre, eBay and PayPal to name a few.

Third, the world has decided that open matters in cloud. People are rejecting a closed cloud model, and that’s why we’ve seen so much traction on OpenStack.

#2 Takeaway: The OpenStack community needs to focus more on usability of OpenStack

Rafael: What needs to be worked on in OpenStack, Jim?

Jim: The first two years were a race for features. The project was dominated by developers and not as much by users … and that’s ok, that’s where we are with OpenStack are right now.  The tradeoff is that you get code that is not necessarily that stable, the product is not necessarily as usable and certainly one that requires you to be an expert. I believe slowing down the process of innovation and focussing more on stability and usability is a really critical goal at this point: making sure that the way upgrades are going to occur from one release to another is fully thought-out, enabling chargeback functionalities … these are things the community just starts to work on.

In terms of features … we now have block storage capabilities built into the latest release as a separate project. It’s hard to imagine building an enterprise-grade OpenStack deployment without these capabilities. Then, virtual networking capabilities are a huge step forward … especially for us as a service provider where you scale massively it’s extremely important.  I think most of the major components that are needed are built into OpenStack by now.

But we need to find an answer to the question: What is the definition of OpenStack? It’s a brand that encompasses a broad range of subprojects ... what should be included in core? How should we think about incubation?  All these things are very important … not only in terms of what we are going to build with OpenStack. The community needs to understand what the scope of OpenStack is, so that they frankly can have the opportunity make money around it.

#3 Takeaway:  A broad ecosystem of OpenStack distribution tightly connected to Linux distros accelerates market adoption

Rafael: There are a lot of distributions popping up around OpenStack … what trends do you see in this area?

Jim: Some people call what Rackspace does a distro …  I would say it’s rather a packaging. We are trying to make OpenStack trunk easily consumable by a non-OpenStack epxert, by making cloud up and running very quickly. People can use it however they want without being tied to a license or support. At Rackspace we make money by providing services on top of that, and some companies are following a similar model.

Some folks are following the traditional Linux distro model by putting OpenStack distros together with Linux distros, which is a well known and established process. Almost every major Linux distro includes OpenStack at this point, which is great in terms of a broad market adoption.

Also, some companies are taking OpenStack and doing proprietary work around it to solve specific use cases or to provide differentiation.

At Rackspace, we firmly believe that one of the promises of OpenStack was to make it easy to consume. It’s an approach very similar to the way you consume Linux. You don’t consume the Linux project, you do so through one of its many distributions. I think with regards to OpenStack, we want people to get as close to consuming trunk as possible, thereby making OpenStack truly open and free.

#4 Takeaway: 25 % of all Fortune 100 companies in the US have downloaded Rackspace’s OpenStack Private Cloud software within the first 45 days after the release

Rafael: Let’s talk about market adoption, Jim. Do you see signs of OpenStack going mainstream?

Jim: Honestly …  we are still a bit away from mainstream, I think that also holds true for cloud in general. At Rackspace, we have two OpenStack products which I can speak of … public and private cloud. Public cloud is still a small share of IT spent and I think that the large enterprises, the traditional IT buyers are just starting to get their hands around and how to consume public cloud and how build on it. Previously it was mostly developers and startups, but it’s certainly going mainstream.

Private cloud is even a little bit further behind in terms of being adopted by companies. But at this point, what has happened is that mainstream CIOs decided that the architecture of the future is cloud. Forget whether it’s in a public cloud or in their datacenter … the concept of consuming physical resources via APIs and building those APIs into applications is the way people are thinking about IT in future. That’s now worked into almost every CIO’s plans.

Rafael: Who are the current early adopters of OpenStack?

Jim: -The most obvious early adopters in the industry are financial services, large enterprises that do experiment with those emerging technologies.

Besides that, at Rackspace we have a good mix of other businesses eager to try OpenStack because of its promise in terms of service model, cost and speed to market.

We just recently released our private cloud software to the market. Over the first 45 days since the release 25% of the Fortune 100 companies in US downloaded it. Over all, we had downloads from 125 countries from all continents. We see a very broad interest in OpenStack.

#5 Takeaway: China is leapfrogging into OpenStack (just as they did with cell phones by skipping landlines)

Rafael: What regions are adopting OpenStack? China seems to be very keen on OpenStack …?

Jim: For certain the biggest market right now is the United States, second biggest market is China … both in terms of contributions as well as commercial interest. Third would be other South and East Asian countries such as India and Japan. Europe is certainly a little bit less … but certainly I would say US, China and broader Asia are showing the most interest in OpenStack at this point.

Rafael: What’s the reason for China’s massive involvement in OpenStack?

Jim: I started working in China with Rackspace about 5 years ago. They didn’t know anything about hosting and the managed services space at all at that time. They didn’t know much about cloud, and the evolution of knowledge has been substantial over that period of time.

When you take a look for example at telecommunications in countries like China: they basically skipped landlines and went straight to cell phones. In part that is happening in the cloud. China didn’t have a large IT infrastructure five or ten years ago, and many enterprises are jumping right into the cloud.

Certainly in a market like China where cost is a concern, where access to technology is a concern, OpenStack is of interest with code for all to have. Actually a significant number of companies that are significantly contributing to OpenStack as well as early adopters and deployers are based in China.

#6 Takeaway: Dell’s great advantage is the broad customer base and the trust these customers put into Dell

Rafael: Jim, how do you view Dell in the OpenStack game?

Jim: Dell is one of the first companies I called when we started OpenStack. We invited Dell to take a look at what we were doing in spring of 2010, even before we announced it. Dell participated in the first OpenStack Design summit, which at that time wasn’t open to everybody … we invited jointly with NASA 25 companies to brainstorm about the project.

Dell from the very beginning brought in a very impressive group of people to work with us on OpenStack. Dell has abroad reach, they know enterprise customers very well, and they engaged with customers very early, helping them to understand and adopt OpenStack. They contributed around OpenStack with Dell Crowbar, and they are very good community participants.

Dell sells to a lot of companies, which trust Dell on how to design and build IT infrastructure for the future. Dell is using that opportunity to bet on OpenStack, and it makes me really happy to see that happen.

Rafael: Thank you very much, Jim. It was a pleasure talking to you!

Resources

Rackspace: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/openstack/

Feedback

Twitter: @RafaelKnuth
Email: rafael_knuth@dellteam.com

This week’s highlight: “OpenStack Board of Directors Talks: Episode 4 with Jim Curry, GM Private Cloud at Rackspace”. Enjoy reading! Also, I would like to invite you to join our webniar series with Inktank: “Four Weeks, Four Webinars: Dive Deeply into Cloud Storage with Ceph and OpenStack”. I hope to see you there!

OpenStack

Inktank: “The momentum continues to accelerate for Inktank and Ceph”
http://www.inktank.com/culture/the-momentum-continues-to-accelerate-for-inktank-and-ceph/

Mirantis: “Mirantis receives $10 million from Intel Capital, WestSummit Capital, and Dell Ventures to Accelerate its OpenStack Game”
http://www.mirantis.com/company/press-release/mirantis-receives-10-million-from-intel-capital-westsummit-capital-and-dell-ventures-to-accelerate-its-openstack-game/

Morphlabs: “Netflix and their ‘Chaos Monkey’” by Christopher Aedo
http://www.morphlabs.com/blog/netflix-and-their-chaos-monkey/

OpenStack Foundation: “Vietnam OpenStack Community 2nd Meeting” by Hang Tran
http://www.openstack.org/blog/2013/01/vietnam-openstack-community-2nd-meeting/

OpenStack Foundation: “October 2013 Summit: Where should we have it?” by Mark Collier
http://www.openstack.org/blog/2013/01/october-2013-summit-where-should-we-have-it/

OpenStack Foundation: “OpenStack Users Speak Up!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1GpItp4RQQ&feature=youtube_gdata

Piston Cloud: “Piston Cloud OpenStack Training, March 7-8 2013”
http://www.pistoncloud.com/training
http://www.pistoncloud.com/doc/OpenStack-Training.pdf

Rackspace: “Taking Elephants To The OpenStack Cloud – A New Initiative With Hortonworks” by Huw Edwards
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/taking-elephants-to-the-openstack-cloud-a-new-initiative-with-hortonworks/

Rackspace: “Meet Racker Kevin Jackson – He Wrote The Book On OpenStack” by Niki Acosta
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/meet-racker-kevin-jackson-he-wrote-the-book-on-openstack/

SUSE: “What Happens In Vegas…” by Brian Proffitt
https://www.suse.com/blogs/what-happens-in-vegas/

Dell

“Don’t complicate my cloud! It’s just infrastructure with an API” by Rob Hirschfeld - Personal Blog
http://robhirschfeld.com/2013/01/06/cloud-is-infrastructure-with-an-api/

“Crowbar 2 Design Meeting 09 Jan 13” by Rob Hirschfeld - Personal Youtube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWvJ9pSgSyM&feature=youtube_gdata

“Crowbar 2 Planning 03-Jan-13” by Rob Hirschfeld - Personal Youtube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbQlNArbF2c&feature=youtube_gdata

“OpenStack 09 Jan 13” by Rob Hirschfeld - Personal Youtube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CFLIXcBMCg&feature=youtube_gdata

“Developers — Where the rubber meets the road” by Barton George - Personal Blog
http://bartongeorge.net/2013/01/07/developers-where-the-rubber-meets-the-road/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bartongeorge%2FnMQw+%28A+Blueprint+for+the+Cloud%29

“OpenStack Board of Directors Talks: Episode 4 with Jim Curry, GM Private Cloud at Rackspace” by Rafael Knuth at Dell TechCenter
http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/b/techcenter/archive/2013/01/10/openstack-board-of-directors-talks-episode-4-with-jim-curry-gm-private-cloud-at-rackspace.aspx

“Four Weeks, Four Webinars: Dive Deeply into Cloud Storage with Ceph and OpenStack” by Rafael Knuth at Dell TechCenter
http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/b/techcenter/archive/2013/01/09/four-weeks-four-webinars-dive-deeply-into-cloud-storage-with-ceph-and-openstack.aspx

Contributors

Please find detailed information on all contributors in our Wiki section.

Contact

Twitter: @RafaelKnuth
Email: rafael_knuth@dellteam.com

Dell converged infrastructure uses virtualization and converged traffic to enable a dynamic datacenter environment. The Active System 800v - the first Dell converged infrastructure solution - utilizes Datacenter Bridging (DCB) to converge network and storage traffic into a single fabric. With DCB and NPAR, this converged traffic is then separated into four partitions in the case of Active System 800v. All three applications recommend VLANs for their management network, application network, and private application clustering network. With DCB, these VLANs exist on one partition for workload traffic, allowing for additional partitions for virtualization failover traffic, hypervisor management traffic, and storage traffic. Global Solutions Engineering implemented Exchange, Lync, and SharePoint using converged infrastructure for separate deployments*.

SharePoint utilizes a management network, a application communication network, and a private network for SQL replication, requiring three total VLANs on one partition. Lync requires a vlan for application communication and a private vlan for the F5 hardware load balancer. Exchange requires a public and a private vlan for the its database communication. Of course, all three applications will need a route to the environment's domain controller and also paths to the end user clients that consume the e-mail, instant message, and content provided by these applications. Recently, Global Solutions Engineering updated The Reference Architecture booklets for Exchange, Lync, and SharePoint to include recommendations for supporting up to 5000 users on a converged infrastructure solution such as Active System 800v*.

When using DCB, hardware iSCSI with raw device mappings in VMware vSphere are recommended. With hardware iSCSI and Raw Device Mappings (RDMs), the preferred method of high availability depends upon each application. Lync uses SQL to store contacts and presence but still functions without access to its database. Therefore, with Lync, the SQL server uses VM high availability, requiring only one SQL server for its deployment. SharePoint functionality depends upon access to its database, so the solution recommends SQL mirroring with a primary SQL server that is mirrored to a secondary SQL server and a SQL witness server for arbitration. Exchange does not use a sql server, and instead utilizes its own database management system for e-mails. Following Exchange architecture, the solution suggests a database availability group of three virtual machines, each running a standalone mailbox server role. More detail into how to create raw device mappings will be provided in a later blog post. Overall, converged infrastructure provides a dynamic datacenter environment that can host a highly available installation of Exchange, Lync, or SharePoint.

*These reference architectures are separated and are not validated to co-exist on the same Active System, but can exist alongside other applications as long as performance requirements are met.

Hi Community, here is my compilation of the most interesting technical blog posts written by members of the Microsoft MVP Community. The number of MVPs is growing well, I hope you enjoy their posts. @all MVPs If you’d like me to add your blog posts to my weekly compilation, please send me an email (florian_klaffenbach@dell.com) or reach out to me via Twitter (@FloKlaffenbach). Thanks!

Featured Posts of the Week!

System Center 2012 SP1 – Virtual Machine Manager Known Issues & Workarounds by Thomas Maurer

Logging Cluster Aware Updating Hotfix Plug-in Installations To A File Share by Didier van Hoye

Failover Cluster Manager affected by KB2750149 by Hans Vredevoort

Create Windows Server 2012 NFS File Share for Vmware by Lai Yoong Seng

Hyper-V

Red Hat Enterprice Linux 5.9 Has Built-In Support For Hyper-V by Aidan Finn

KB2781512 – WinRM “PUT” operations to Hyper-V fail on a W2008R2 With WMF 3.0 Installed by Aidan Finn

Can I Run Windows Server 2012 VM in Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V? by Lai Yoong Seng

Windows Server 2003 VM Login Screen Turn Black in Hyper-V by Lai Yoong Seng

Free Ebook :- The Hands-on Guide: Understanding Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 by Lai Yoong Seng

Remote File Browsing Issue In Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Leaves Results Pane Empty Workaround by Didier van Hoye

Windows Server Core

Windows Server 2012 NIC Teaming Part 1 – Back To Basics by Aidan Finn

Windows Server 2012 NIC Teaming Part 2 – What’s What? by Aidan Finn

Windows Server 2012 NIC Teaming Part 3 – Switch Connection Modes by Aidan Finn

Windows Server 2012 NIC Teaming Part 4 – Load Distribution by Aidan Finn

Windows Server 2012 NIC Teaming Part 5 – Configuration Matrix by Aidan Finn

Logging Cluster Aware Updating Hotfix Plug-in Installations To A File Share by Didier van Hoye

Create Windows Server 2012 NFS File Share for Vmware by Lai Yoong Seng

Recommended hotfixes and updates for Windows Server 2012-based Failover Clusters #WS2012 by Robert Smit

Failover Cluster Manager affected by KB2750149 by Hans Vredevoort

NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch, QoS and actual performance | part 3 – Performance by Hans Vredevoort

Videocast Hyper-V Features erklärt – SMB Multichannel in German by Carsten Rachfahl

Windows 8

#PSTip Invoking Windows Update in Windows 8 by Shay Levy

System Center Core

Update Rollup 1 for System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 by Aidan Finn

System Center Configuration Manager 

Monitoring Macintosh (Mac) and Linux/Unix/Solaris with System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) SP1 2012in Portuguese by Marcelo Sinic

Strike Up Another Reason For Using System Center Configuration Manager In Your Cloud by Aidan Finn

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

Don’t Install WMF 3.0 On VMM Managed W2008 R2 Hyper-V Hosts by Aidan Finn

System Center 2012 SP1 – Virtual Machine Manager Known Issues & Workarounds by Thomas Maurer

Networking Virtualization in VMM 2012 SP1 by Alessandro Cardoso

System Center Orchestrator

New Integration Packs and Toolkit for Orchestrator 2012 SP1 in Portuguese by Marcelo Sinic

System Center Dataprotection Manager

Inconsistency Check Error When Backup VHD Using DPM by Lai Yoong Seng

Lync

Log Into And Use 2 Lync Accounts At Once by Aidan Finn

PowerShell

#PSTip Resolving IP addresses with WMI by Shay Levy

#PSTip How can I determine if I’m in debugging mode? by Shay Levy

It is called Member Enumeration and not Implicit Foreach by Jeff Wouters (no MVP)

#PSTip Resolving an IP Address to host name and vice versa using .NET by Ravikanth Chaganti

Windows PowerShell 3.0 language specification available for download by Ravikanth Chaganti

Graphing with the PowerShell Console by Jeffery Hicks

PowerShell Screen Shots by Jeffery Hicks

PowerShell Console Graphing Revised by Jeffery Hicks

Remotely Administering vWorkspace with Mobile-IT by Adam Driscoll

Microsoft Azure

Windows Azure Services on Windows Server has launched by Hans Vredevoort

Windows Azure Services on Windows Server for Hosting Service Providers now available by Thomas Maurer

#Microsoft Active Directory from on-premises to the #cloud with #WindowsAzure by James van den Berg

Events

PowerShell conference in Germany by Shay Levy

Learning

Free Labs, courses and Second Shot for Microsoft Exams by Leandro Carvalho

Tools

José 3.3: Kleines Update und neue Homepage in German by Nils Kaczenski

Other MVPs I follow

James van den Berg - MVP for SCCDM System Center Cloud and DataCenter Management
Kristian Nese - MVP for System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management
Ravikanth Chaganti - MVP for PowerShell
Jan Egil Ring - MVP for PowerShell
Jeffery Hicks - MVP for PowerShell
Keith Hill - MVP for PowerShell
David Moravec – MVP for PowerShell
Aleksandar Nikolic - MVP for PowerShell
Shay Levy - MVP for PowerShell
Adam Driscoll - MVP for PowerShell
Marcelo Vighi - MVP for Exchange
Johan Veldhuis - MVP for Exchange
Lai Yoong Seng - MVP for Virtual Machine
Rob McShinsky - MVP for Virtual Machine
Hans Vredevoort - MVP for Virtual Machine
Leandro Carvalho - MVP for Virtual Machine
Didier van Hoye - MVP for Virtual Machine
Romeo Mlinar - MVP for Virtual Machine
Aidan Finn - MVP for Virtual Machine
Carsten Rachfahl - MVP for Virtual Machine
Thomas Maurer - MVP for Virtual Machine
Alessandro Cardoso - MVP for Virtual Machine
Robert Smit – MVP for Cluster
Marcelo Sinic - MVP Windows Expert-IT Pro
Ulf B. Simon-Weidner - MVP for Windows Server – Directory Services
Meinolf Weber - MVP for Windows Server – Directory Services
Nils Kaczenski - MVP for Windows Server – Directory Services
Kerstin Rachfahl - MVP for Office 365

No MVP but he should be one

Jeff Wouters - PowerShell

The size and capacity of a SharePoint Server 2010 implementation vary based on several factors, such as the number of concurrent users, service applications in the farm, the expected uptime service-level agreement (SLA), and others. These factors dictate how many servers are required in the SharePoint farm and how the overall farm architecture looks. Also, when looking at the infrastructure design decisions for multi-tiered applications such as SharePoint, virtualization technologies should be considered to achieve higher utilization levels and reduce the overall infrastructure costs. Virtualization results in additional benefits, such as reduction in infrastructure costs required to deploy the application farms and enable dynamic on-demand scalability of the application.

Virtualizing a SharePoint 2010 application deployment requires certain best practices be followed to achieve optimal application performance, to ensure high availability of the farm components, and to realize the additional benefits mentioned above. The three-tier architecture governs the best practices to be followed and requirements while deploying SharePoint Server 2010 in a virtualized environment. This includes factors such as resource (CPU/memory/storage) sizing for the present needs, scalability to support to business growth, and planning for high availability of the application infrastructure.

However, SharePoint Server is a platform for achieving various things. No two customers use SharePoint the same way. So, the sizing aspects become little tricky compared to other application workloads. This is where we use a combination of factors such as workload usage profile, number of concurrent users, and number of requests per second desired in the implementation to determine the right size of the hardware to support the SharePoint workload. This sizing guidance should include enough room to support growth in the near future, at least. The other aspects, such as high availability, are typically the characteristics of the underlying infrastructure. For example, does the infrastructure used for virtualizing an application like SharePoint provide support for easier scalability? Does this infrastructure support failover and high availability features for the applications? And, if so, how does it complement the application level high availability features?

Once we have the right sizing and other design aspects figured out, we need to implement the application architecture and validate the same against the requirements we laid down before the design phase. This is the most important step in the process to ensure the infrastructure and application architecture supports the minimum requirements and meets the expectations.

As a part of Dell’s Enterprise Solutions Group (ESG), we published a detailed study of designing and implementing SharePoint Server 2010 on Active Infrastructure. In this design and implementation guidance, we addressed the steps mentioned above and provided guidance on implementing a virtualized SharePoint Server 2010 farm for 5000 concurrent users in a SharePoint collaboration usage profile.

As an extension to the design and reference implementation guide, a performance study was conducted to understand the overall reference implementation capabilities and how the Active System 800v infrastructure design principles help the application enable high availability. This performance study was performed using Dell SharePoint Load Generation framework. 

For detailed best practices, configuration guidelines, performance validation procedures, and results, please refer to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010: Design and Implementation on Active System 800v.

Dell Software announces the addition of two new utilities to Dell vOPS Server Explorer freeware appliance from Dell VKernel, a provider of enterprise-class capacity management and performance monitoring products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments. The new Storage Explorer utility adds capabilities to assess storage performance and capacity. The new Change Explorer tracks the evolution of configuration changes in the virtual environment. The new utilities are part of the vOPS Server Explorer suite that now contains five free utilities in one downloadable virtual appliance.

vOPS Server Explorer is a suite of five free utilities for VM administrators to use in their environments. For more information on the utilities, check out the vOPS Server Explorer overview page.

To download the free suite of utilities, please click here: vOPS Server Explorer, a Freeware Suite.

Figure 1: vOPS Server Explorer Five Utilities

Last week we announced the upcoming webinar series hosted by our partner Inktank: Four Weeks, Four Webinars: Dive Deeply into Cloud Storage with Ceph and OpenStack. Tomorrow, we will kick off with the first webinar in that series:

#1 Webinar: Getting Started with Ceph
January 17, 2013
10:00AM PT, 12:00PM CT, 1:00PM ET
Register now

Join to learn:
• The architectural requirements of the Ceph Cluster
• The role of the core RADOS components
• What happens if an OSD fails
• How to spin up a cluster using a VM image
• What is required to expand the cluster

Ceph is an open source and freely-available object store and file system designed to provide excellent performance, reliability and scalability. For further information, please visit:

http://ceph.com/
http://www.inktank.com/
https://twitter.com/inktank

Looking forward to see you soon! In case you have any questions, feel free to contact us:

Jude Fitzgerald (Inktank)
Jude.Fitzgerald@inktank.com
@JudeFitzz

Rafael Knuth (Dell)
rafael_knuth@dellteam.com
@RafaelKnuth

NAS NDMP Backup Challenges

Enterprise storage has witnessed unprecedented growth of unstructured data over the last decade. This has created multiple challenges for implementing efficient backup and recovery policies.

The Dell EqualLogic FS7500 NAS supports standard backup software using NDMP Ver 4.0. With no optimizations, the NDMP backup processes uses one network interface on the backup server and the maximum backup throughput is limited to 120 MB/sec (this is the theoretical max of a 1 Gb NIC). This limitation is not acceptable when the amount of data stored on the NAS grows because storage administrators will not be able to meet aggressive RTO and RPO requirements.

Note: The theoretical limit of 120 MB/sec does not apply to FS7610 platform which uses 10 Gig interfaces.

FluidFS architecture & CommVault features to address the NDMP backup challenge

The Dell FS7500 NAS is capable of providing near line rates for large file backups. To achieve higher optimized backup throughput, we need to use multiple front-end NICs on an FS7500 and also multiple NICs on the backup server. FluidFS architecture allows up to eight Virtual IP addresses to be defined per NAS appliance and network load is automatically balanced across all these interfaces. These virtual IP addresses can be used to address the NAS independently. In a backup context, this allows creation of independent backup paths to the NAS, thereby allowing the FluidFS firmware to dedicate exclusive resources to independent backup paths.

The CommVault feature ‘Data interface pairs’ allows you to create pairs of network interfaces. Each pair consists of a single interface on the backup server and a single Virtual IP (VIP) on the NAS. The unique source-destination addresses of the data interface pair enable the backup process to take advantage of multiple NICs and other resources on the NAS.

The following diagram shows how the FluidFS network load balancing feature was used along with the CommVault data interface pairs feature to optimize NDMP backup.

Note:  A Dell DL2200 with CommVault Simpana was used as the NDMP client in the test configuration. The same principles can be applied to other backup applications such as Symantec, as long as similar features are supported.

Configuration steps

Steps to achieve higher backup throughput using Dell FluidFS network load balancing and the CommVault ‘Data Interface Pairs” feature are listed below.

• Four virtual IP addresses were defined on the FS7500 as shown in the figure below.

Note: Theoretically, the data interface pairs can be created using all eight VIPs that map to eight client network interfaces of the FS appliance, but the test setup used only four NICs. 

• Assign and dedicate four NICs on the backup server with separate IP addresses.
• Create a mapping between four individual virtual IP addresses on the FS7500 with the four dedicated IP addresses configured on the backup server. This pairing was created using the CommVault CommCell console.

As shown in the above diagram, four virtual IP addresses on the FS7500 were added as 1st Machine Interfaces. Similarly, four IP addresses on the backup server were added as 2nd Machine Interfaces.

Performance Benefits

The Data Interface Pairs feature from CommVault was used to distribute the network throughput across all four NICs dedicated for client connectivity. This optimization along with the FluidFS network load balancing feature enabled utilization of all four NICs on the backup server and four client facing NICs on the FS7500. This effectively created four 1 G lanes for backup and improved the backup performance by approximately 135%. In my test setup, only three EqualLogic PS6100XV arrays were used as back end storage for the FS7500 appliance. Additional arrays would have helped in scaling the backup performance further.

Online IT communities such as Dell TechCenter and Microsoft TechNet are great resources for learning about technical content.   Because conversations on the Internet can happen anywhere, community members often talk about Dell content on the Microsoft communities and visa versa. Recently, Dell and Microsoft have teamed up to recognize contributors that create Microsoft related content on DellTechCenter.com through the Microsoft Community Contributor badge.

Community Contributor recipients on TechCenter have earned the honor in a range of ways, including providing helpful answers on forums, authoring wikis or blogs on Microsoft topics, or creating videos that cover Microsoft products. Contributors will have a special badge show up next to their posts on the site for the for 3 months after being recognized.

Going forward, Microsoft and Dell will recognize the top contributors of Microsoft related content on Dell TechCenter. 

Please join us in congratulating the following Microsoft Community Contributors on Dell TechCenter for the first quarter of 2013:

• Dustin Hedges 
• Warren Byle 
• Greg Ramsey 
• Michael Schroeder 
• Ajith George 
• Ravikanth Chaganti 
• Tim Bicknelle 

• Microsoft Community Contributors Page on Dell TechCenter
• Microsoft Community Contributors Site
• Microsoft TechNet

With a product that is representative of Dell’s end-to-end solutions, we have put together a team of engineers to answer your technical questions. On Tuesday, Jan. 22, at 3 p.m. CT, Dell experts from the converged infrastructure team will give an overview of Active System 800 as part of the weekly TechChat.

Active System is the newest converged infrastructure offering within the Active Infrastructure family, and leverages Dell innovations including unified management, converged LAN/SAN fabrics and bladed form factors for the ultimate converged infrastructure system that can be easily deployed and operated in a unified manner.

Some of the topics we’ll touch on in the TechChat are hardware specification, software components, Active System Manager and reference architectures. To get an overview, check out the Active System wiki. 

If you have some questions you’d like to start off with, leave them in the comments below.

Please join the upcoming TechChat January 22^nd 2013, 09.00 – 10.00 am CST (if you are in a different time zone please check the time zone converter).

Dell vOPS Server Explorer
Dell Software just recently announced in a press release the addition of two new utilities to its vOPS Server Explorer freeware appliance from Dell acquisition VKernel, a provider of enterprise-class capacity management and performance monitoring products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments. The new Storage Explorer utility assesses storage performance and capacity, while Change Explorer tracks the evolution of configuration changes in the virtual environment. The new utilities are part of the vOPS Server Explorer suite that now contains five free utilities in one downloadable virtual appliance.

vOPS Server Explorer Overview
Download vOPS Server Explorer
Blog post by Mattias Sundling

How to join the chat
In order to attend the chat, go to delltechcenter.adobeconnect.com/chat (important note: do not type www) No registration is required, but make sure you have Java up and running. If you have any questions, please contact rafael_knuth@dellteam.com. Looking forward to see you there!

Please note our Dell TechCenter team will host another TechChat later the same day (3.00 pm CST) on Dell Active System 800.

Chat Hosts
Mattias Sundling, Evangelist and vExpert at Dell (Twitter: @msundling)
Stephen Spector, Cloud Evangelist at Dell (Twitter: @SpectorAtDell)
Rafael Knuth, Global Community & Content Manager at Dell (Twitter: @RafaelKnuth)

This post was written by Hasnain Shabbir, Thermal Engineer, Dell Inc.

Why this blog?

Working on thermal design of Dell servers and especially their thermal control systems, I find it very useful to get your feedback. It helps me to improve our products for next generation and let you know about thermal design features.

Since the launch of our PowerEdge 12^th generation server lineup, we have heard from customers about temperature concerns in the system; for example, component, surface cover, and exhaust temperatures. To answer these concerns, I want to help explain the key thermal design philosophy behind our 12^th generation servers. This post is intended to give you useful information about temperature levels, options contained within the BIOS for adjusting temperatures, and explanation of other benefits, like power savings, that are not necessarily intuitive.  

What is ‘hot’?

Let’s have a short conversation about temperatures. When we “feel” temperatures, we feel them relative to temperatures with which we are most familiar.  The air in many business buildings is around 25C (77F) – comfortable for a human.  The surface of a hot cup of coffee can be around 45-55C (113-131F) and feels uncomfortably hot to the touch.  Server cover temperatures may reach the same range, leading you to think that is unusual, since you may not ordinarily be in contact with something at that temperature. 

As it turns out, CPUs and many other components (like memory, network and storage controller chips) in servers are designed to run reliably at such high temperatures. For example, server CPU temperature limits of 90-100C (194-212F) – a range since it varies from different CPU bins – mean that you can run the processor close to those limits without impacting the reliability of the CPUs. The last statement is a very important one since most discussions about hot components boils down to (no pun intended) concerns about reliability.

So if someone says, “the cover of the computer is too hot to touch!” it is relative to what we feel as “normal” in our day to day life. We might personally feel really hot at an ambient of 35C (95F), or feel a surface at 50C (122F) to be really hot to the touch, and then translate that to our concerns about a CPU in the server that is running at 90C (176F).  But, operation at “hotter” temperatures does not make the product less reliable; in fact, the product is designed to run close to specification temperatures within the warranted life of the product.

But why run it so hot?

So the next logical question is:  Why does Dell operate the CPUs at such high temperatures? Why not run the CPU or server cooler?

You might be surprised to hear that it is actually easier for me to design a server to run cooler than necessary. Strange, right?  But the fans used to cool the CPUs can themselves consume a big chunk of the server operational power. Because you pay for power to run the server and hence the fans, I want to lower your electricity bills by reducing the fan speed as much as I can while allowing the CPUs to operate within their specification temperatures. Furthermore, reducing the fan speed reduces the acoustical noise.

The art is in designing the cooling system to be a minimum burden on the system power consumption. Instead of running fans at full speed all the time, causing top cover temperatures to be closer to what we as humans feel as comfortable, and consuming 20% of server power to cool the system, I optimize the fan speed to meet the CPU specifications to use as low as  3% of server power.  That is a significant amount of power savings.  The power savings multiply by the number of servers deployed and save recurring power cost for the life of the server. In addition, airflow from the server needs to be handled and conditioned, and this can impose needs on data center air handling, which has its own additional cost.  So our effort is to cool (not over cool) the server within thermal specifications of all components in the system with minimum waste of cooling power.

I am feeling hot in here!

A consequence of running the components hotter to conserve and optimize system power is that average temperatures in and around the system are higher, including exhaust air temperatures. This may be viewed negatively among IT professionals generally because they must physically interact with the servers during service. Although these temperatures are within their appropriate safety and handling limits, and power savings are realized with no risk to system reliability, they are not necessarily ergonomically friendly. With that in mind, and the fact that different customers have different requirements, Dell provides additional knobs that allow IT professionals to set higher fan speeds than those mandated by thermal algorithm. In this way, cooling concerns can be mitigated and handling temperatures can be improved, but at the higher operating cost of the fans due to higher fan power consumption. Note that the fans may only be set at higher speeds and not lower than what the algorithm mandates to keep the systems within thermal specifications and ensure system reliability is not at risk. Some of you may be concerned that running the fans at higher speeds may risk the fan reliability but you should be comforted to know that the fans are reliable to the life of the product even if they were run at full speed all the time. These knobs are available in the BIOS menu and are described in pages 8-10 of the following white paper:

 http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/advanced_thermal_control_whitepaper.pdf

Cool?

So I hope this blog will help you open your hearts to more heat (but greater efficiency) and feel a little cooler in your pockets (saving you recurring operating cost).  I will be delighted to receive “hot” as well as “cold” comments on this blog and hope to post more in the future.

I will leave you with some useful links for further reading:

Dell Power & Cooling Technologies website: http://content.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/power-and-cooling-technologies.aspx

Advanced Thermal Control – A white paper: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/advanced_thermal_control_whitepaper.pdf

Technical specifications for Intel processors: http://ark.intel.com/

This week’s highlight: “Indian OpenStack User Group Meetup 01-19-2013” You can find more information here.

Enjoy reading!

Hadoop

Datameer: “Hadoop Ecosystem as of January 2013 – Now an App!”
http://www.datameer.com/blog/perspectives/hadoop-ecosystem-as-of-january-2013-now-an-app.html

OpenStack

Cloudscaling: “Elastic infrastructure: Down from the clouds vs. up from the enterprise datacenter” by  Azmir Mohamed
http://www.cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/elastic-infrastructure-down-from-the-clouds

Cloudscaling: “Deploying and Scaling Stackato Private PaaS on Open Cloud System”
http://www.cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/deploying-and-scaling-stackato-private-paas-on-open-cloud-system/

enStratus: “Five Mitzvahs of Cloud Computing” by George Hadjiyanis
http://enstratus.typepad.com/blog/2013/01/five-cloud-mitzvahs.html

Mirantis: “Building out Storage as a Service with OpenStack Cloud” on-demand webcast
http://info.mirantis.com/building-out-storage-as-a-service-with-openstack-cloud

Mirantis: “Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Assist | Services for OpenStack”
http://www.mirantis.com/openstack-services/do-it-yourself-assist/

OpenStack Foundation: "Case Study: WebEx Deploys Enterprise Operations Infrastructure with OpenStack"
http://www.openstack.org/summit/san-diego-2012/openstack-summit-sessions/presentation/case-study-webex-deploys-enterprise-operations-infrastructure-with-openstack

OpenStack Foundation: “Summary and Review of the 2012 Openstack China Tour” by Hui Cheng
http://www.openstack.org/blog/2013/01/summary-and-review-of-the-2012-openstack-china-tour/

OpenStack Foundation: “OpenStack at FOSDEM’13” by Stefano Maffulli
http://www.openstack.org/blog/2013/01/openstack-at-fosdem13/

Piston Cloud: “OpenStack, Oracle, iCloud, and Obama — My Predictions for 2013” by Joshua McKenty
http://www.pistoncloud.com/2013/01/my-predictions-for-2013/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=my-predictions-for-2013

Rackspace: “OpenStack 101 - What Is OpenStack?”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz5gyDenqTI&feature=youtube_gdata

Rackspace: “Learn The Open Cloud With Rackspace Training For OpenStack” by Tony Campbell
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/learn-the-open-cloud-with-rackspace-training-for-openstack/

Rackspace: “Rackspace Training For OpenStack Heads To MIT” by Larry Meyer
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/rackspace-training-for-openstack-heads-to-mit/

Dell

“Crowbar 2 Planning 2013-01-17” by Rob Hirschfeld - Personal Youtube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2xbSXu4C7w&feature=youtube_gdata

“Crowbar 2 Design Meeting 2013-01-15” by Rob Hirschfeld - Personal Youtube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnJvGQ47u-Q&feature=youtube_gdata

“Crowbar 2 Design Meeting 2013-01-10” by Rob Hirschfeld - Personal Youtube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlMuhgG79Co&feature=youtube_gdata

“Crowbar Dev Tool ISO Build” by Rob Hirschfeld - Personal Youtube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQDNFT2za7A&feature=youtube_gdata

“Open Source Clouds at VIRTu Alley Event” by Stephen Spector - Personal Blog
http://spectorintexas.com/2013/01/16/open-source-clouds-at-virtu-alley-event/

“Talking about Project Sputnik and the importance of Devs to Dell” by Barton George - Personal Blog
http://bartongeorge.net/2013/01/15/talking-about-project-sputnik-and-the-importance-of-devs-to-dell/

“Emerging cloud solutions and driving innovation at Dell” by Barton George - Personal Blog
http://bartongeorge.net/2013/01/17/emerging-cloud-solutions-and-driving-innovation-at-dell/

“【第三回】OpenStackボードオブディレクターTalk - Cloudscaling Co-Founder & CTO Randy Bias氏” by Yoshihiro Oue at Dell TechCenter Japan
http://ja.community.dell.com/techcenter/b/weblog/archive/2013/01/15/openstack-talk-cloudscaling-co-founder-cto-randy-bias.aspx

“Four Weeks, Four Webinars: Dive Deeply into Cloud Storage with Ceph and OpenStack” by Rafael Knuth - Dell TechCenter
http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/b/techcenter/archive/2013/01/09/four-weeks-four-webinars-dive-deeply-into-cloud-storage-with-ceph-and-openstack.aspx

Contributors

Please find detailed information on all contributors in our Wiki section.

Contact

Twitter: @RafaelKnuth
Email: rafael_knuth@dellteam.com

This blog post has been written by Sanjeev Singh and Elie Jreij from the iDRAC team

Some of you may want to configure the iDRAC and other system components through the system serial interface. This blog explains how to do just that ...

With the iDRAC7 firmware version 1.30.30 or later  and BIOS 1.4.x or later installed, you can accomplish full deployment of your server through the serial interface (DB9 connector) on the server. To do this,

1. Connect AC power to the server. Note, the server doesn’t need to be powered on until you’ve completed the system configuration.
2. Wait for iDRAC to initialize (this may take up to 2 minutes).
3. Connect the management station to the serial connector on the server (example shown below).
4. Launch your terminal application and configure its baud rate to 57600, N,8,1  with no flow control.
5. Send  the “<esc >” key followed by the “(“ key. The hexadecimal values for these keys are: 0x1b and 0x28 respectively. The management station should now be connected to the iDRAC and the iDRAC login prompt should be displayed in the terminal window..

At  this time, you can log in to the iDRAC as an administrator. To avoid having to log in each time and to prevent the log-in session from timing out, you may want to disable authentication. To do this, enter the following command:

racadm getconfig/config -g cfgserial -o cfgserialconsolenoauth 0

To re-enable authentication, enter the same command, replacing the trailing “0” with a “1”.

 Once logged in, you may configure BIOS, iDRAC, NIC and other settings. This configuration can be done from the serial interface by using RACADM commands. For complete information on RACADM commands, see the RACADM Command Line Reference Guide here.

Here are a few sample commands to get you started:

BIOS configuration / status:

racadm getconfig –g cfgServerBIOS

racadm set bios.satasettings.SataPortB off

racadm set BIOS.SysSecurity.SysPassword "dell" 

iDRAC configuration / status:

racadm getconfig -g cfgSerial

racadm racresetcfg

racadm serveraction powercycle

racadm getsel

 NIC configuration / status:

racadm getniccfg

racadm config -g cfgLanNetworking  -o cfgNicEnable 1 [or 0]

racadm config -g cfgLanNetworking  -o cfgNicIPv4Enable 1 [or 0]

racadm config -g cfgLanNetworking　 -o cfgNicUseDhcp  0 [or 1] 

You might also want to update the firmware for BIOS, NIC, iDRAC, and / or the Power Edge Raid Controller (PERC) through the serial interface.

Here is a sample command to update the iDRAC7 firmware from a TFTP server: 

racadm fwupdate –g –u –a [TFTP IP Address] 

When you’re done making the desired configuration changes, power-up the server and the configuration  changes and firmware updates will be applied by the Lifecycle Controller. If the server is already on, you’ll need to reboot to apply the settings.

Stay Tuned: PERC configuration will be supported in a future iDRAC firmware release.

 Additional Information

More information on iDRAC

Hi Community, here is my compilation of the most interesting technical blog posts written by members of the Microsoft MVP Community. The number of MVPs is growing well, I hope you enjoy their posts. @all MVPs If you’d like me to add your blog posts to my weekly compilation, please send me an email (Florian_Klaffenbach@dell.com) or reach out to me via Twitter (@FloKlaffenbach). Thanks!

Featured Posts of the Week!

Monitor Web Site Health From Around The World Using System Center 2012 SP1 by Aidan Finn

Configuring anti-affinity for Hyper-V virtual machines by Ravikanth Chaganti

How to build a iSCSI Target Cluster on Windows Server 2012 by Thomas Maurer

The Zombie ISV® by Didier van Hoye <- You definitively have to reas this! 

Windows Server Core

Windows Server 2012 NIC Teaming Part 6 – NIC Teaming In The Virtual Machine by Aidan Finn

Windows Server 2012 NIC Teaming Part 6 – Support Policies by Aidan Finn

The Big Changes In WS2012 Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) by Aidan Finn

How to: Import Export (Setup) Windows Server 2012 configuration windows features by Robert Smit

#Debug #Eventlog #WS2012 Hard ? now way Use the hidden options. Windows 2012 Tips by Robert Smit

How to build a iSCSI Target Cluster on Windows Server 2012 by Thomas Maurer

Windows Server 2012: what’s new in Failover Cluster Services (MSCS) by Marcelo Sinic

Lync Server

Himmlische IT Podcast Folge 24: Lync Online in German by Kerstin Rachfahl

Hyper-V

KB2754704 – DSM Notifies MPIO On W2008 And W2008 R2 That A Path Is Back Online by Aidan Finn

KB2710870–No DHCPv4 Address After Restarting Hyper-V VM with Vista, Win7, W2008 or W2008 R2 by Aidan Finn

KB2799728–VM Enters Paused State Or CSV Goes Offline When Backup WS2012 Hyper-V Cluster by Aidan Finn

Memory Leak Issues Being Reported With KB2799728 by Aidan Finn

KB2779768–Experiencing Issues When Using NLB In VMs On WS2012 NIC Teaming by Aidan Finn

W2K12 Hotfix related to Host Level Backup of VMs by Hans Vredevoort

Hyper-V Replica Broker: Cluster network name resource failed to create its associated computer object in domain by Kristian Nese

Configuring anti-affinity for Hyper-V virtual machines by Ravikanth Chaganti

System Center Core

Upgrading System Center 2012 RTM/SP1 RC to SP1 RTM-Part 1 (SCCM, SCOM, Orchestrator) by Marcelo Sinic

Upgrading System Center 2012 RTM/SP1 RC to SP1 RTM-Part 2 (SCVMM, SCDPM, SCSM and App) by Marcelo Sinic

System Center Operations Manager 

Monitor Web Site Health From Around The World Using System Center 2012 SP1 by Aidan Finn

System Center Global Service Monitor Availability by Aidan Finn

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

How to Export VMDK from VMware Vcenter and V2V using VMM? by Lai Yoong Seng

Manage Self Service (Multiple) Private #Cloud with Tenants for in your datacenter with #SCVMM Part 1 of 2 by James van den Berg

Azure

Developing Multi-tenant Applications for the #Cloud, 3rd Edition – Book Download #WindowsAzure by James van den Berg

Exchange

The Exchange 2013 alphabet: ActiveSync by Johan Veldhuis

Group Policy

User Shell Folders: Umgebungsvariablen umbauen mittels Group Policy Preferences in German by Matthias Wolf

PowerShell 

PowerShell function to check for a loaded module by Jeff Wouters (no MVP)

It is called Member Enumeration and not Implicit Foreach by Jeff Wouters (no MVP)

PSSnapin – Could not load file or assembly or one of its dependencies by Jeff Wouters (no MVP)

PowerShell Graphing with Out-Gridview by Jeffery Hicks

Rename Hashtable Key by Jeffery Hicks

Silly Saturday PowerShell Palindromes by Jeffery Hicks

PoshUtils: Export Visio pages in PowerShell by Ravikanth Chaganti

#PSTip List all WMI event classes by Ravikanth Chaganti

#PSTip Check if the path is relative or absolute by Ravikanth Chaganti

#PSTip Get the count of items in an enumeration by Ravikanth Chaganti

#PSTip Get a random item from an enumeration by Ravikanth Chaganti

Windows PowerShell – 2013 Technology of the Year Award winner by Shay Levy

SQL Server

How to: Create a New #SQL 2012 SP1 Server Failover Cluster (Setup) multiple instances on windows 2012 Quick Guide by Robert Smit

Tools

vKernel Adds Tools to Free vOPS Server Explorer 6.3 by Didier van Hoye

Other

The Zombie ISV® by Didier van Hoye

Videointerview mit Stefan Köll (MVP CDM) zu System Center 2012 in German by Carsten Rachfahl

Other MVPs I follow

James van den Berg - MVP for SCCDM System Center Cloud and DataCenter Management
Kristian Nese - MVP for System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management
Ravikanth Chaganti - MVP for PowerShell
Jan Egil Ring - MVP for PowerShell
Jeffery Hicks - MVP for PowerShell
Keith Hill - MVP for PowerShell
David Moravec - MVP for PowerShell
Aleksandar Nikolic - MVP for PowerShell
Shay Levy - MVP for PowerShell
Adam Driscoll - MVP for PowerShell
Marcelo Vighi - MVP for Exchange
Johan Veldhuis - MVP for Exchange
Lai Yoong Seng - MVP for Virtual Machine
Rob McShinsky - MVP for Virtual Machine
Hans Vredevoort - MVP for Virtual Machine
Leandro Carvalho - MVP for Virtual Machine
Didier van Hoye - MVP for Virtual Machine
Romeo Mlinar - MVP for Virtual Machine
Aidan Finn - MVP for Virtual Machine
Carsten Rachfahl - MVP for Virtual Machine
Thomas Maurer - MVP for Virtual Machine
Alessandro Cardoso - MVP for Virtual Machine
Robert Smit - MVP for Cluster
Marcelo Sinic - MVP Windows Expert-IT Pro
Ulf B. Simon-Weidner - MVP for Windows Server – Directory Services
Meinolf Weber - MVP for Windows Server – Directory Services
Nils Kaczenski - MVP for Windows Server – Directory Services
Kerstin Rachfahl - MVP for Office 365
Matthias Wolf - MVP Group Policy

No MVP but he should be one

Jeff Wouters - PowerShell

It was just another day of discussion for automatically getting or setting the values of BIOS tokens remotely on Dell system(s) and and the ultimate choice of everyone was to use Windows PowerShell with Windows Management Instrumentation(WMI) using OpenManage Client Instrumentation (OMCI) in the backend.

WMI is Microsoft implementation of Common Information Model(CIM). CIM is an public standard defined and published by DMTF. WMI is a core Windows management technology; one can use WMI to manage both local and remote computers. WMI provides a consistent approach to carrying out day-to-day management tasks with programming or scripting languages.

The Dell OpenManage™ Client Instrumentation (OMCI) is software that allows remote management application programs to access asset information about the client computer, configure BIOS & Boot Sequence settings, monitor the health status of the Client computer. It's tight integration with WMI allows customers to take advantage of the rich scripting capabilities for collecting information and customizing system settings. OMCI contains the underlying driver set that collects system information from a number of different sources on the client computer, including the BIOS, CMOS, System Management BIOS (SMBIOS), System Management Interface (SMI), operating system, APIs, DLLs, and registry settings. The default namespace used for access to the Dell OMCI classes is “root\dcim\sysman”.

Windows PowerShell is Microsoft's task automation framework, consisting of a command-line shell and associated scripting language built on top of .NET Framework. PowerShell provides full access to WMI and COM, enabling administrators to perform administrative tasks on both local and remote Windows systems. Administrative tasks are generally performed by cmdlets. Sets of cmdlets may be combined together in scripts.  

Microsoft has been bundling Windows Management Framework with all its recent OSes and PowerShell is a part of this Framework. Recently microsft release of the Windows Management Framework has powershell version 3.0 available.

To know the version of poweshell on your system:

• Click Start, click All Programs, click Accessories, click Windows PowerShell, and then click Windows PowerShell.
• In the Windows PowerShell console, type the following command at the command prompt and then press ENTER:

Get-Host | Select-Object Version

The output of this will display the version of the Windows PowerShell used on the system.

Hence Microsoft Windows PowerShell using Microsoft WMI services and Dell OMCI package makes it the best combination pack that can be the could be used in enterprise environment. The different usage scenarios are as listed below:

1. Asset Monitoring

To get the processor description of any computer remotely, the System administrator can issue the following command from PowerShell:

Get-WmiObject-ComputerName <Computer-Name> -Namespace root/dcim/sysman -Class DCIM_Processor | Select Description

The output will provide the description of the processor on the system.

2. Configuration Management

To enable or disable BIOS tokens (like Num Lock) on any computer remotely, the System administrator can issue the following command from PowerShell:

(Get-WmiObject-ComputerName <Computer-Name> -Namespace root/dcim/sysman -Class DCIM_BIOSService) | Foreach-Object { $_.SetBIOSAttributes($null, $null,"Num Lock","2")}

 The third argument of the function SetBIOSAtrributes which is a method of the class DCIM_BIOSService is the token name while  the fourth argument should be the set of possible values that the token should be set with. 

3. Health Monitoring using Alerts 

To monitor the health of the system using CIM indication, the System administrator can issue the following set of commands from PowerShell:

Get-EventLog -ComputerName <ComputerName> -LogNameSystem | Where-Object {$_.Source -eq "OpenManage Client Instrumentation"}

Summary:

Hence using PowerShell, which uses the services of WMI to make a remote CIM query which will use services of a software like OMCI that will help modify the BIOS configuration or help get inventory or the state of the system, the System administrators can easily carry out day-to-day management task remotely on a enterprise system.

This post was authored by Saritha KG 

With Dell 12th Generation PowerEdge Servers that are Fresh Air Compliant, Dell enables customers to have cost effective choices in the cooling infrastructure in their data centers.

A Dell Fresh Air compliant system or configuration can tolerate up to 900 hours at 104 F (40 C) temperature per year and up to 90 hours at 113 F (45 C).

The latest to join the family of Dell Fresh Air Compliant Systems is the PowerEdge M1000e Chassis with the latest firmware version Chassis Management Controller (CMC) firmware 4.3.  Dell customers can avail the benefit of this feature by ordering a Fresh Air model chassis, however this feature cannot be enabled in field. Also, a ‘Fresh Air Compliant’ chassis does not necessarily imply that all the components (blades, switches, and so on) of the chassis are also fresh air compliant.

You can check the Fresh Air compliance of a M1000e chassis by logging into the CMC Web Interface or using Racadm Command Line Interface getsysinfo command. The message ‘PowerEdge M1000e Fresh Air’ is displayed if the chassis is Fresh Air compliant.

For more information on CMC Fresh Air Compliance feature, see the following:

• Dell Chassis Management Controller Firmware Version 4.3 User's Guide
• Fresh Air research report (04-06-2012) available on the Dell TechCenter Community Media page
• Blogs, Videos and Whitepapers at www.Dell.com/FreshAir and at Dell Techcenter Dell PowerEdge Servers with iDRAC7 Fresh Air Cooling Features
• Chassis Management Controller wiki on Dell TechCenter