For me, blogging on a Sunday is unheard of – the other/better half ensures it doesn’t happen, however, today is a travelling day (and she’s not here!) – I’m off to Athens to attend NetApp Insight 2009 (More on Microsoft and NetApp in another post) so it seems almost ironic that this post is about Microsoft and HP.

Patrick, over on the MVUG blog, pointed me at some very valuable information for those of you building solutions on HP and Hyper-V R2 technologies.  From Patrick’s blog:

HP has just released "HP BladeSystem reference architecture for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 virtualization (Hyper-V)". This document describes reference architectures validated by HP for the deployment of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V (Hyper-V R2) on an HP BladeSystem infrastructure.

The specification provides an outline of Hyper-V R2 and explains how an entire IT infrastructure can be created from HP BladeSystem c-Class components, HP LeftHand or StorageWorks SAN storage, and HP ProCurve switches.

Also oo help you plan your own Hyper-V R2 deployment on HP BladeSystem, the reference architecture provides a bill of materials (BOM) for Small, Medium, and Large configurations.

The document can be downloaded from here.

For me, the nice thing about this document, is that it’s not just about configuring the server hardware.  Instead, this document details information around both iSCSI and Fiber SAN configurations, along with integration from a networking perspective with ProCurve.  Definitely worth a read if you’re working with both of these vendors around virtualisation.