Synastra

Are you using Windows Vista by chance?

HP System Management Home page is installed by default along with the management Agents if you installed the OS using HP SmartStart CD that ships with the server. If you didn't use SmartStart (Which is a fab way of setting up a machine) you can download the latest disk and install the proliant support pack. This will give you full health information on your machine. HP System Insight Manager is an optional server install, physical or virtual and this will monitor all your HP server and give driver updates but The support pack must be install on all machines and SMNP needs to be setup to send traps. It's worth it because you will know when things are going wrong. SIM also sends emails, text. I love it and it's free! PS it also manages any SNMP device, get reporting on switches, Printers & wireless! SmartStart X64 version: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=1121516&prodNameId=3288134&swEnvOID=4064&swLang=8&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=MTX-8d8870eebb4244918bd75303f4 SmartStart x32 Version: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=1121516&prodNameId=3288134&swEnvOID=4022&swLang=8&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=MTX-8a41f45cfa874dcda389506213 HP System Insight Manager: http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/hpsim/download.html

As long as the RAID array has been rebuit (Check in HP System Managment Homepage) you can just pull the drive and replace. It was probably using the hot spare, so just look to see. If you not using system Managment Homepage, why not?

I have the same system but we installed it ourselves. The interesting thing was the type of 3 phase breaker need to protect the UPS. Although it's a 3 ph unit, the load can be only on 1 phase to the racks. We also found that if the UPS was in by-pass mode for maintenance, the the UPS only draws power from 1 of the 3 phases so the breaker has to be specified to cope with your total load on 1 of the 3 phases. Ours is a 100A 3 phase MCB but in normal conditions, it only pulls 10 amps per phase. I did take a lot a reading to get right.

As with all good Network Managers/Senior technicians, we like to do our research before reporting back to the management team with our shopping list. After reading lots of posts on this site it’s interesting that people regularly ask what SAN to buy and you get the usual answers of speed and performance but the interesting point is why are you taking the decision to buy a SAN without all the facts? Most Schools have limited access to external advice but why stumble around in the dark, buy a SAN and then realise that you have a lemon. The one key piece of information required when looking at a virtualisation project is a capacity planning report. Companies like VMware offer a service that installs a small service on one server in your current setup and then collects information on most performance counters, disc capacity and network band width across your entire infrastructure. This runs for a month and produces a report that will tell you exactly what specification you need for your SAN and Hosts. You really need the help of others on this one if your project is to run smoothly. Many companies offer this service for free as long as you take a quote from them for Hardware etc. This doesn’t mean you have to use them! When it comes to SAN choice, well there are lots out there but apart from the obvious, look into what a SAN can do for you as an administrator. • Can it be updated without downtime • Will it still run if parts fail (Redundancy) • Can I grow storage without downtime • Will it tell me when things are going wrong before it fails • What is the support like? Forums/whitepapers & Blogs It’s now a year since I went through this process and with a report in hand, I knew that only a few SANs would give us the iops needed to virtualise our 20 physical servers. We went for an HP P4000 series SAN also known as Lefthand a scale out solution. This put us in control of the storage and not the other way round. The key for us was the network RAID feature that enables data to be raided not just across each node of the storage but across the nodes as well. This means that a whole node could fail and we still have a fully working SAN. We can do software upgrades during the day without disruption and we can allocate extra storage to data stores on the fly. It has simple GUI console that you can install to manage the SAN. The SAN intergrates with HP’s System Insight manager which is free and this monitors our infrastructure and gives real time status of the network. The best thing of all was the cost. We were quoted nearly £300k for a NetApp equivalent and the lefthand came out at a fraction of that and was full featured out of the box. A special bid direct with HP gave us a 50% discount from list and that gave us an enterprise class SAN at entry level pricing. Don’t make the mistake of buying a fitted kitchen for a house that you haven’t measured up!

Hi Gary, There's a hotfix for wallpaper as it's not applied correctly and you normally just see a black screen. Here's the link: The "Desktop Wallpaper" Group Policy setting is not applied in Windows 7 or in Windows Server 2008 R2 Worked fine for us after it was applied. Regards Paul

Hi Gary, I haven't had any Issues with DPM 2010 but you do have to install the windows backup feature on the DC if you want to backup the systemstate data. Have you done this? I'm sure you have. I did get a funny problem that the replicas would alway fail to sync and fixed this by removing bare metal recovery from the protection job. Cheers Paul

Hi Geoff, GPO's are only stored on a DC. When you use the Remote AdminTools on Win7 (or server 2008), you are opening directly from the server, not the local machine. Changes are then replicated to all DC's. If you are updating your DC's to R2, this can only be a good idea but to benefit you need to raise the domain functionally level to 2008 R2, you can only do this if all the DC's are running the same OS Version. Regard Paul P.S Can't PM because I have too few post.....

Hi Gary, A few misconseptions here. GPO's live on domain controllers only, you can't use a stand alone server to store GPO's. Win7 & Vista GPO templates (ADMX files) are stored in a new location that can be created manually on a 2003 or 2003R2 DC but you can only manage GPO's for Win7 & Vista from a Server 2008 or R2 DC or client PC which is running Vista or Win7. you don't need to upgrade your DC to 2008 or 2008 R2 but if you can it's a good idea. Browse your network and find \\DomainContoller\sysvol\your.domain.name\policies you should see GUID foldernames, in the policies folder, is there a folder called PolicyDefinitions? if no then Copy the PolicyDefinitions folder from a Win7 client computer with all the files and folder within, to do this, locate the PolicyDefinitions folder on the Win7 machine, C:\Windows as an example. Now copy the folder to the \\DomainContoller\sysvol\your.domain.name\policies folder. If your DC's are not 2008 or better, download the remote server tools for Win7 once installed you can manage the new ADMX templates from the Administration tools. The new tools look at the new folder you crated for all the policies. You can add Office ADMX files to the PolicyDefinitions folder. The rule is that you have to add 2 sets of templates to the PolicyDefinition folder. the root files are the policy templates and there is a language folder that must contain the localised language definitions. Hope this helps. I would recomend upgrading your DC's to 2008 or 2008R2 if you can as there are so many new features and management tools. Remember to raise the domain functionally if you do... Hope this helps Paul