Reasons to use shared uplink instead of tunning with VMWare hosts?

[Mike O.]

I'm looking for opinions on using shared uplink sets compared to tunneling.   I'm not really looking for the process of setting them up, but more of why to use one over the other.

We have four C7000 chassis with a mix BL460 and BL465 G7 and G8 server blades, pretty much running all VMWare.

Shortly, we're going to be in the process of rebuilding one of our chassis.  It has the older 1/10G non-flex modules and 3.6 firmware.  We've purchased some new flex10 modules and I'm basically going to start clean with current firmware, etc. 

When we initially started using the blades and VMWare about 5 years ago, we started out using the shared uplink sets with about 10 VLANs.      

As we kept converting more servers into our VMWare environment, it was getting more cumbersome to keep defining the VLAN in the virtual connect environment as on VMWare, so several year later, we switched from using shared uplink sets to tunneling mode.

It seemed much simpler to just have our networking group add the VLAN to the inbound trunk at the external switch level, let Virtual Connect just pass it through, and then define the VLAN/port groups in VMWare.

Since we're starting clean on this build, I wanted to re-examine the options between SUS and tunneling.  In a pure VMWare environment, where you're defing the port groups, is there any advantage to using a shared uplink set in Virtual Connect?

[Mike O.]

Nobody??

[sgunelius]

Mike,

I'm planning to do the same and was wondering if you ever got an answer.  I'm going to create a new SUS and use VLAN Tunneling so I can test how it works.  I've opened a support call to HP's Virtual Connect team, but so far have only been sent the cookbook.

Scott

[Casper42]

Its really just flexibility.

Tunneling, you bring in a bunch o VLANs and then you send that same bunch out. You are doing almost zero management of those VLANs inside VC.

SUS = You bring in a bunch of VLANs and then you can use any or all of those VLANs for various servers in the enclosure.
So you can split out Management VLAN for some FlexNICs, Virtual Machines using several VLANs on other FlexNICs, iSCSI broken out on its own set, etc.
Want to mix in a Bare Metal Windows SQL server? you don't have to hit it with the entire tunnel and use teaming to prune the traffic, you just hand it the VLAN it needs and thats it.


The downside to SUS is that if you have 8 ESXi servers and you want to add a new VLAN X to each one, you have to add it to the SUS and then touch all 8 Server Profiles to add it to each one.
This can be scripted but its still a bit of a pain.

OneView has a feature that can help here but that is a paid option above and beyond standard Virtual Connect.