Monthly Archives: June 2015

read

And more blogs and sites I’ve been reading and sharing

A little bit of a longer one than usual, as I was part way through writing this the other month, then I got distracted with other blog posts.

Hope you find some of these useful.

Documentation

EtherealMinds Eleven Rules of Design Documentation – This is one the best articles I’ve read in a long time, and reiterates the fact you need to keep it simple and a diagram replaces a thousand words.

Microsoft Continue reading And more blogs and sites I’ve been reading and sharing

logo veeam on forum uk 2015

Last Minute VeeamON:Forum London plug!!!

Oops I forgot to post this last week as I was busy finishing off my Cisco UCS Blog posts, but still if you read this in time, maybe you’re in the area and can nip down, or pull a sickie and get in, the event will be worth it!!

Personally I was all booked up for a trip down to the capital from the sunny north of England, however due to unforeseen circumstances, I cannot make it. Which is a shame, as I’ve been speaking to a few vendors that will be there, and it sounds as this will be a properly organised event, and not something thrown together.

So head on down and enjoy it for me!!!!


VeeamON_Forum_UK_logo

VeeamON Forum, in June -http://go.veeam.com/veeamon-forum-uk
Europe’s Premier Data Center Availability Event. The one and only event that’s entirely focused on solving your challenges in providing Availability for the Modern Data Center™

When: 6/11/2015

Where: The Science Museum. Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London SW7 2DD

Main topics:

  • Externalizing your backups with Microsoft Azure and Veeam

Speaker: Ric Howe, Partner Technology Strategist, Microsoft

  • Tuning your v8: Top 10 Misconfigurations

        Speakers: Phillip Moore, Russell Nolan

  • Recovery – how storage snapshots complement a Backup & DR strategy

Speaker: Phil Davies, Senior Systems Engineer UK&I at Nimble Storage

  • Veeam Backup & Replication Best Practices 2015

Speakers: Chris Dearden, Preben Berg

EXCLUSIVE Veeam product presentation about NEW Veeam products coming in 2015

  • The event is entirely focused on solving challenges in providing availability of ALL applications and data.
  • Meet key Veeam® people and the world’s leading IT experts and visionaries to ask questions, share experiences and learn new ways to succeed!

Contests: LAB WARZ – Veeam’s first tech Contest, to be brought to Europe due to popular demand from VeeamON 2014 in Las Vegas. This action-packed competition will bring together IT pros, engineers and Veeam enthusiasts from Europe to tackle a Veeam-scenario obstacle course. Every participant will get a number of real cases in which he would have to solve the problem in limited period of time. The person who gets more points for solving cases – wins! Grand prize – Microsoft Surface Pro 3, second place prize – Apple Watch Green, 3rd Place Prize – Go Pro Hero 4.

Among event sponsors are Nimble, Microsoft, HP, Cisco, NetApp, Tintri – they are preparing their own speakers and contests.

And every participant of the event can win grand prize – trip to Formula 1 in Monaco! (Presumably in 2016)


Regards

Dean

2015 04 20 22 05 11

Deploy a Cisco UCS system – Part 4 – Upgrading the Firmware

My previous posts in the series covered getting the Cisco UCS up and running and into production, and it seems that adding how to upgrade the Firmware on the UCS at the end of the series is best, as you will find yourself needing to do this once the system is in production as well.

Note: Many thanks to Rene again for this simple post helping me through the steps.

Note2: It’s also worth looking through this short article on the do’s and don’t of UCS Firmware updates, from a session held at Cisco Live 2014.

Covered in this post;

  • Pre-reqs
  • Getting the Firmware
  • Upload firmware into UCS Manager
  • Upgrading UCS Manager
  • Upgrading the Fabric Interconnects
  • Upgrading the Blade Servers
Pre-Reqs

Continue reading Deploy a Cisco UCS system – Part 4 – Upgrading the Firmware

2015 04 20 22 05 11

Deploy a Cisco UCS system – Part 3 – from scratch for VMware ESXi

This is the final part of the series, where I cover off installing ESXi 6.0 onto the blade of the UCS system.

  • Setting up the SD Cards (FlexFlash)
  • Installing ESXi via KVM

Note: Please check your firmware is at the correct level needed. You can see this guide for upgrade the firmware.

Setting up the SD Cards (FlexFlash) Continue reading Deploy a Cisco UCS system – Part 3 – from scratch for VMware ESXi

2015 04 20 22 05 11

Deploy a Cisco UCS system – Part 2 – from scratch for VMware ESXi

In my first post, we got as far as setting up the management interface of the Cisco UCS Platform. In this second part, I’ll be covering;

  • Setting up the connectivity
  • Configuring the VLAN connectivity
  • Setting up Port Channels
  • Setting up the Appliance connectivity
  • Configuring LAN policies
  • Configuring VNIC Templates
  • Creating Server Policies
  • Building a Service Profile Template
  • Deploying a Service Profile from a Template
Setting up the connectivity

Continue reading Deploy a Cisco UCS system – Part 2 – from scratch for VMware ESXi