Are you aware that Version Mismatches are a Big Cause of Outages?

How much time do you spend keeping your data center versions compatible? Wouldn’t you like to automate this task?

Ensuring compliance with HPE/VMware Recipe is a critical component in keeping your data center running smoothly. Veering from this path leads to a variety of potential unanticipated problems, including service degradation and outages, if your specific combination of software versions has not been confirmed as reliable.

In the ideal world, all like equipment (Virtual Connect modules, servers, NICs…) would have the same software/firmware versions, all of which would be adhering to a published confirmed matrix. When an upgrade needed to be made on one or more types of equipment, it would first be confirmed which were the correct complementary software versions from the matrix so that the data center would continue to be using compatible software/firmware, and plans would be made and then implemented on how to transition the entire data center to the newer matrix.

However, as we all know in the real-world, things don’t generally work like this. Equipment is deployed at different times, problems are solved at the equipment level (rather than data center wide), and the nature of the dynamic environment ensures that without the proper procedures in place, followed by everyone, software/firmware mismatches are bound to occur.

Manually going through the inventory of software/firmware versions in a large constantly changing data center to ensure compatibility with matrixes is a tremendously difficult and time-consuming task, with the possibility of errors arising in each step of the way.

For the company running the data center, or for a consultant advising the enterprise, having an accurate list of software versions installed for each device/equipment, and then figuring out how to make changes so that the data center will be compliant with the compatibility matrix, is a first step towards reducing risk.

And now there is a tool available that will automate this task, for large and small data centers alike. You can use MagicFlex (www.magicflexsoftware.com) to quickly identify compatibility matrix mismatches AND provide you with recommendations on how to upgrade so that you can become compliant.

Below is an example of a MagicFlex-generated report, identifying a problem and the solution: