Introduction

I have worked with HP Hardware (rack and blade servers) for more than five Years. I think that blades and HP enclosure is fantastic product and has wonderful capabilities.

Managing you blade infrastructure might be sometimes challenging. I decided to guide you through components of HP c7000 Enclosure and components you can use. After short introduction I went through initial configuration and additional settings which I thing are quite useful.

HP c7000 Enclosure overview

The HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure goes beyond just Blade servers. It consolidates server, storage, networking and power management into a single solution that can be managed as a unified environment.

Keeping you hardware and software up to date is very important in every environment. Today I will guide you through firmware update in HP c7000 Enclosures.

In the second post I will guide you through configuration of networks and providing network connectivity to Blade Servers.

Welcome to first post about HP Virtual Connect Module configuration. In first post we will focus on initial Virtual Connect Module configuration and some additional settings which are important from my point of view.

One of my recent tasks was to upgrade firmware version of virtual connect. I would like to share with you procedure how to do it.

In order to do that you need two things:

• Virtual Connect Support Utility. You can download it from HP website: http://h20564.www2.hp.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c04264271
• Virtual Connect Firmware

Backup your domain configuration

One of my recent tasks at work was to test **HP 365GB MLC IO Accelerator for BladeSystem c-Class **in order to accelerate Database workloads on Virtual Machines.

Issue

Today I found that several of my ESXi servers running on HP Blade bl460c G8 had warning in Hardware Status tab in vSphere client.

Since almost a month I am very happy user of new hardware. Finally after 5 years my previous PC was replaced. All equipment I bought was

• Processor: Intel Core i5 4670
• Motherboard: ASRock Z87 Extreme6
• Memory: Corsair DDR3-1866 CL10 Vengeance 32GB
• GPU - Built in HD 4600
• Hard Drive: Samsung 840 Pro Series 512GB

Since quite a long time I have a pleasure to work with HP Enclosures c7000 and c3000. HP Blades with enclosures is the really great enterprise solution. Over the years I found difficult to manage multiple enclosures with local users and this is where integration with Active Directory makes your life simpler. In few steps, I will guide you how to integrate Onboard Administrator with Active Directory LDAP.