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Xenserver 6 – Create an Addtional Local Storage Respository with Thin Provisioning Support

/ Christopher Paquin / 1 Comment

ShippingSo recently I deployed 3 XenServer 6 hosts with local storage only. Our need was to virtualize approx 6 very old Centos QA servers running on ancient hardware.

Since I did not have any dedicated network/san storage at my disposal I stuck 6, 146 SAS drives in each server and carved them up into a 410GB raid 10 array.

However the XenServer install did not detect this secondary logical disk, so I had to figure out how to manualy create a storage repository using this new drive.

The first thing that I needed to do was to see how the disk was identified by the OS, for this I used fdisk

#fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sdb: 440.3 GB, 440345714688 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 53535 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Using the output above I was easily able to determine that my secondary drive was /dev/sdb.

So first this i did was to determine the UUID of the host that I was logged into

xe host-list

Which spit out the output below

# xe host-list
uuid ( RO) : 4a9971f7-1e59-4e02-b849-04d206ee7b2b
name-label ( RW): xen01
name-description ( RW): Default install of XenServer

Then I ran the following command to create my new SR on /dev/sdb on xen01

xe sr-create host-uuid=4a9971f7-1e59-4e02-b849-04d206ee7b2b content-type=user type=ext device-config:device=/dev/sdb shared=false name-label=”Local storage 2″

Then I confirmed that the new SR was created

xe sr-list host=xen01

Note that one fo the things that I found most odd with this process is that you do not actually create a partition on your disk before turning it into a storage repository.

How to Use Hpacucli in ESXi

/ Christopher Paquin / Leave a comment

Miracle_WhipWow just stumbled into this one today as I was dreading having to reboot my ESXi 4.1 boxes just to see a few new local disks.

Apparently you can install hpacucli in ESXi very easily, and whats even better is that you can install it directly on a datastore and use the install on any host that has access to that datastore. No need to reinstall on each and every host in your cluster. No need to reboot to configure your disks.

Anyway here is the link to the how to, its obviously written by a Windows Guy, but it works easy enough.

http://v-front.blogspot.com/2012/03/how-to-run-hp-online-acu-cli-for-linux.html

 

Update: Apparently HP now provides an official version of hpacucli for ESXi 5 as part of HP ESXi Utilities Offline Bundle for VMware ESXi 5.0.

Also note that I found that my HP servers with the P400 card did not detect the new logical drives, even after a rescan. Apparently a reboot is required. However my HP boxes with the P410 card did detect the new logical drives after a rescan and no reboot was required.

 

Reset HP ILO Via the Command Line

/ Christopher Paquin / 6 Comments

Gary_the_snail Its not unheard of that an HP ILO (Integrated Lights Out) can become sick and slow down to a crawl. When this occurs, a restart of the ILO is in order, which is easily accomplished via the ILO cli interface. Note that you need to make sure that that you have enabled ssh access in ilo.

The steps to reset an ilo via ssh are below.

</>hpiLO-> cd /map1
status=0
status_tag=COMMAND COMPLETED

</map1>hpiLO-> reset
status=0
status_tag=COMMAND COMPLETED
Resetting iLO.

CLI session stopped

Additional Resources:

http://fatmin.com/2011/06/13/redirect-linux-console-to-hp-ilo-via-ssh/

http://www.thevirtualway.it/en/?p=985

http://setaoffice.com/2010/07/17/connecting-to-hp-ilo-using-the-command-line/

ProLiant System Management Homepage

/ Christopher Paquin / Leave a comment

Prod-shot-170x190 The HP Systems management homepage is a web based utility for managing and monitoring Proliant Servers. It can be installed via the ProLiant Support Pack DVD (on linux its just an rpm). Once installed you can modify the default settings via the perl script, hpSMHSetup.pl located in /usr/local/hp.

To access your server's homepage navigate to https://<yourhostname&gt;:2381 in your browser. You must include the https:// part of the url. Use your root user and password to access.

From the homepage you can monitor system, subsystems and status views of your server. Any critical, major, minor, or warning alerts will appear in the Overall Status Summary.

 

Latest HP Proliant SmartStart and Firmware DVDs 10-06-2010

/ Christopher Paquin / Leave a comment

 

Hpweb_1-2_topnav_hp_logo

If you are having issues with your HP server and were thinking about calling support, you might as well put down the phone. Seems to me that their default first step of troubleshooting is to advise you to upgrade to the latest firmware.

According to HP support these were both release just a couple of days ago. Links are below. Firmware DVD is just that, firmware. Smart Start is drivers and diagnostics.

 

Firmware DVD

Smart Start DVD

 

 

 

 

 

Using hpacucli to Manage Disks on HP Servers Running Linux

/ Christopher Paquin / 3 Comments

DL380Hpacucli is the a command line Array Configuration Utility program for Smart Array Controllers and RAID Array Controllers. The command can be installed in one of two ways; either by standalone rpm, or as part of the Proliant Support Pack. The utility is useful as it allows you to create and delete raid configs without having to reboot.

First run the hpacucli command to start the utility. Once the utility is started run the command below to show your arrays and disks.

=> ctrl all show config

In my case I had added 3 additonal drives to a DL385 G1 with the intention of creating a simple raid1 mirror with a hot spare. The command below creates the second array, array B.

=>ctrl slot=0 create type=ld drives=2:3,2:4 raid=1

Now I can view my new array using ctrl all show config.

  array B (Parallel SCSI, Unused Space: 0 MB)

      logicaldrive 2 (67.8 GB, RAID 1, OK)
      physicaldrive 2:3   (port 2:id 3 , Parallel SCSI, 72.8 GB, OK)
      physicaldrive 2:4   (port 2:id 4 , Parallel SCSI, 72.8 GB, OK)

Now I add the remaining drive as a hot spare to the newly created array B

=> ctrl slot=0 array B add spares=2:5

The command below can be used to show the status of your array, which in my case is not good.

=> ctrl all show status

Smart Array 6i in Slot 0 (Embedded)
   Controller Status: OK
   Cache Status: Temporarily Disabled
   Battery/Capacitor Status: Failed (Replace Batteries/Capacitors)