topic Network connectivity in BladeSystem - General

Network connectivity

M_J_S — Fri, 10 May 2013 13:06:54 GMT

Hi,

I am looking to run a POC on some P2P migrations in preparation for a Datacentre migration. I am looking to purchase a c7000 chassis and use flex fabric 10/24 VC which will be required in the new DC. servers will be either

BL460 G8 with FF 553FLB adapters.

BL460 G7 with NC553x flexFabric adapters.

My concern is connectivity in my test environment.

If I swap out the flex fabric 10/24 VC with an older 1GB Ethernet passthrough module, will the servers be able to connect via the passthrough ports to my old cisco 650x switch?

I realise that the passthrough will be redundant in the new DC but this is not really of great concern.

Regards

Re: Network connectivity

Casper42 — Tue, 21 May 2013 00:19:53 GMT

BL460c Gen8 QuickSpecs:

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/14208_na/14208_na.html

Standard Features
- Network Controller

One (1) HP FlexFabric 10Gb 2-port 554FLB FlexibleLOM
NOTE: Supports FCoE, Flex-10, TCP/IP offload engine, hardware-based accelerated iSCSI, iSCSI boot, and autosensing 10Gb/1Gb Ethernet.
NOTE: Each port is autosensing 1Gb/10Gb, and can interoperate with 1Gb HP BladeSystem c-Class interconnect components. Both ports will operate at the same speed.

So you should be fine with 1Gb PTMs while testing

PS: Why not just use a couple 1Gb Copper Transceivers on the FlexFabric Modules? Not as much total bandwidth but you said Test environment, so I wasn't sure you need that much.
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13652_na/13652_na.HTML#Related Options
HP BLc Virtual Connect 1Gb RJ-45 Small Form Factor Pluggable Option Kit - 453154-B21

You can do 3 per FlexFabric (X5-X7) easily. If you really want to do 4 (X8), then you need to use a DAC cable to connect X4 on each FlexFabric module to each other externally (Replace functionality lost by using both X7 and X8). JD095B for instance can do the X4 to X4 job and is approx $100

Re: Network connectivity

M_J_S — Wed, 22 May 2013 07:32:05 GMT

Thanks for the info,

I will be purchasing the flexfabric modules when the chassis moves to the live DC. For now though, we have some 1GB PTMs available so will use them instead.