Gen8 blades default to the '530FLB' adapter ??

[don_m]

I've just wasted a sizeable portion of my day trying to attach our 2 new BL465 G8 blades to our fibre channel network thru the flexfabric switches. Of course, this worked flawlessly with a few dozen G7 blades and the previous G8 that we ordered. G7 worked since they came with only the 551 or 553 version of the CNA, the G8 worked since it was ordered with the 554FLB model. These all do FC and 10Gbe.

Apparently, the default ordering configuration for the G8 gives the 530FLB which does 10Gbe only.

Would I be incorrect in assuming that the majority of the HP blade users would want FC connectivity ??  Or has the majority moved on to FCoE or iSCSI connections ??

thanks,

Don M.

[David_Schwartzs]

The 554FLB uses FCoE for its fiber channel connections. It's not native fiber channel. The 530FLB is Flex-10 - it doesn't support fiber channel nor FCoE.

FYI - all the standard "BTO" off the shelf configurations of the BL465c Gen8 come with the 554FLB by default. I don't know if configure-to-order configurators default to that or not (and HP has more than one CTO configurator depending on route to market, both on the end-user side as well as the reseller partner side, so it could be defaulting to 530FLB *somewhere* in some system although not everywhere.)

See the quickspecs:
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/14325_div/14325_div.HTML#Models

Just an opinion - I personally don't think many people are using FCoE at all. I don't personally trust FCoE yet, and many higher level storage engineers I've talked to are of the same opinion - routing a lossless protocol like Fibre Channel through a lossy framework like ethernet is a scary proposition, no matter what precautions are taken. Routing FCoE essentially dilutes the primary advantages of FC.

If I wanted to implement fiber, I'd stick fiber interconnects on my blade chassis and some QLogic mezz cards into the servers. (Of course, along this vein, I could also go on grinding my axe about Intel's architecture limitations for Gen8 that make Mezz slot 2 unavailable in single processor Intel servers, but I'll save that for another day. and simply denote my love of the BL465c Gen8 because AMD doesn't have that limitation and 16 core processors are awesome.)

[Casper42 · Accepted solution]

I was going to say roughly the same thing but I don't think you need to go with traditional FC Mezz cards and Interconnects.

All the BTO builds come with 554.
Only CTO builds would come with 530.
So whomever did your Quote (HP Direct or a Partner?) screwed the pooch.

If it hasn't been too long since it was ordered, ask them to fix it for you. The FLB is a removable part and theoretically the 554FLB and 530FLB have the same price when ordered with a new server.

There is a program known internally as Customer First for fixing goofs like this.
See if they can leverage that.

[don_m]

It turns out that it was myself 'screwing the pooch'.  I built the config at the B2B site and overlooked the section to specify the 554 CNA.  After a bit of arm-twisting HP did swap them out and we're up and running.

This was also the same order where they shipped regular sized SD cards for the BL465 G8 when it only has a micro-SD slot.  They also fixed that screw up.

thanks for your insight,

don m.