ESX(i) Flex-10 and Blades - what the best networking setup?

[Mustafa Sayla_1]

Hi we are in the process of setting up flex 10 in our environment also. We have a C7000 chassis with two flex10 modules in bay 1 and bay 2 each with 4 10GB ports. On the Cisco VSS side we have created a 8 port trunk. On the flex 10 side we want to do something similar; that is one big 80GB trunk. We have been told by HP that it is not possible because you cannot aggregate ports from bay 1 and ports from bay 2. Not sure it that is a true statement. Do you have any input on this? This environment is mainly for our new VMWare ESXi Farm and we are trying to come up a config that can give us the maximum bandwidth. Any input is appreciated.

[Bart_Heungens]

Hi

First I wouldsuggest to create to trunks of 40Gb, so 1 for module 1 and another for module 2...

Inside VC you need to create also 2 Ethernet networks...

This is to be able to create a active/active environment... If you bundle ports from multiple modules in 1 trunk, you will get active/passive connections...

Please check which setup you exactly want in the VC Ethernet Cookbook: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01990371/c01990371.pdf

Further on VC you do not need to create anything, on Cisco side you need at least an EtherChannel...

Best practices of configuring the CIsco switches can be found in the Virtual Connect for the Cisco Administrator document: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01386629/c01386629.pdf

Kr,

Bart

[jorgemgonz]

Hi there. This is question for anyone out there with experience installing ESX(i) 4 or 5 on HP Blade Systems.

I have experience with BL460's but I have a questions regarding the Full height Blades. We are currently deploying HP BL685c G7 Blades - 8 per c7000 chassis. And plan to run ESXi-5-U1 on the blades. We realize that the BL685's come with 2 dual port CNAs -  which yields 4 LOMs per blade. If we carve out all of the possible bandwiths 4 per LOM then we are left with 16 Flex NICs. 2 Flex Nics will be used for FC.

That leaves 14 Ethernet Flex NICs that can be presented to the ESXi5 OS.

If we present all 14 Flex NICs to ESXi5 as VMNICs are we in violation of the VMware-ESXi5 Configuration Maximum of 8 10Gbe NICs allowed to be presented to ESXi5?

Would we be in an VMware Un-supported configuration?

Is it best to just carve out the required bandwith and only present 8 ethernet Flex NICs Max to the ESXi5 OS?

Thank you inadvance for your help. - Jorge