Experience with HP Blade C7000 and Virtual Connect Flex-10 Ethernet Modules

[tuanthanhle44]

Hello Damien Tijerina,

I am Tuan Le from Vietnam. We are dealing with the same situation as yours for deploying Nimble Storage with server HP Blade C7000 (Virtual Connect Flex-10 Ethernet Modules) without 10Gbps switch.

Please share with me some experience from your case

- What is your best practice up to now to archive HA?

- What manual part you yourself help to do in comparing to available a switch?

Thanks.

[tmoore106]

The Virtual Connect cookbook has no reference to direct connect SAN.

http://h20628.www2.hp.com/km-ext/kmcsdirect/emr_na-c02616817-5.pdf

[pdavies34 · Accepted solution]

If you refer to the previous threads on this:

Re: Can't Set Up Nimble Manager

Re: Anyone sucessfully connect a Nimble to an HP C7000 blade chassis?

You will find that while this may be "techncially" possible it is not supported by Nimble and can give unexpected issues when a failover of the Nimble controllers occurs - to the extent that your data may not be avaialble.

Recommendation - Never Connect a Nimble Array Directly to a Server NIC

[Red3]

-

[jzygmunt70]

I ran into this same situation in a DC that only had 10GB ports on a C7000 blade chassis.  It can be done, but I don't recommend it.  If you pursue this approach, devices will be able to communicate with the Nimble storage, however anytime a controller failover occurs you will manually have to make networking adjustments to reestablish communication.  The reason is that the flexfabric blades aren't actually switches.  If you want to pursue this further, let me know and I'll go into more detail.  Ultimately, I added 10GB switches to my DC.  I can go into more detail if you want to pursue this further.

[Red3]

MY drawing shows 4 networks connected to the nimble via 2 switches (located at the top of the stack) the 2 switches on the sides are for management only. Net result is 4 paths from the nimble to the c7000 blades with 2 active and 2 standby. Fail overs are seamless. And net throughput is 20 GB.