10 G communication through a Procurve 5412zl

[Daniel Wells]

I have three hosts with X520-DA2's in them (1-SLES10sp4 and 2-VMware ESXi 5).  I have connected them to an HP Procurve E5412zl (J8698A)switch with a 10G module (J9538) and an HP direct connect cable (J9285B).  I am unable to get communication to cross the wire from the hosts to the switch.

I downloaded the latest driver for ESXi 5.0 (ixgbe version 3.9.13) and I still have the problem there.

On the Linux front I am using SLES 10 sp4.  I downloaded the 3.9.17 driver and compiled and loaded it.  I checked and it says I am using ixgbe version 3.9.17-NAPI (firmware version 0x546c0001).

I am not able to get traffic to go out through the cable.  There are solid green lights at both ends with another green light flashing.

I really frustrated here.  HP tech support tells me that I can only reliably connect HP cables to the HP switch, Intel says I should use Intel cables. So I'm getting nowhere fast.

Questions:

Is the HP SFP+ connector that is on their direct connect cable compatible with the Intel X520-DA2?

The responce from Intel was to download the latest driver which I did (see above).

Thanks in advance!

[Richard Litchfield]

ProCurve switches only work with ProCurve DACs. If you don't have a ProCurve SFP+ direct attach cable (DAC), it worn't work. The 10Gb switchport will have an orange error light if the DAC is not working.

You will probably find that the ProCurve DACs will work with the Intel NICs. NICs really need to work with everything - the vendor will never know what upstream device it will be connected to!

[Daniel Wells]

That is all very well and good in theory.  Unfortunately in practice, it is not working.

So how do you get the Intel card to communicate across the HP DAC throught the HP switch?

[Daniel Wells]

Is ther something that needs to be done on the switch to make this work!?!?

[Richard Litchfield]

There is not a lot of info to go on...VLANs, subnets, trunks, ACLs, routing, etc all may have a part to play.

If you have a default config (ie all ports, including the 10Gb ports) are in VLAN1, and they are all in the same subnet, then any port with a similarly configured device (untagged, same subnet) will be able to communicate with each other.

If you have multiple VLANs/subnets, you will neeting routing, and possibly trunks (multiple VLANs) to the ESX hosts.

Some useful commands that may be useful in sorting out where the connectivity issues are:

show lldp info remote
show mac-address
show arp
show interface brief

[Daniel Wells]

It appears that the problem is the HP cables I was told to get.  I found another person who had the same switch and NIC and ended up using a third party DA cable because the HP one would not work.  I am trying to find out which cable they used.

[usgsmeis]

Did you ever find out which cable he used?

[Richard Litchfield]

The ONLY cables that work in the ProCurve switches are ProCurve cables. Third party cables DO NOT work.

These are the ProCurve SFP+ DAC part numbers - note that they all start with J.

HP X242 SFP+ SFP+ 1 m Direct Attach Cable J9281B
HP X242 SFP+ SFP+ 3 m Direct Attach Cable J9283B
HP X242 SFP+ SFP+ 7 m Direct Attach Cable J9285B
HP X242 SFP+ to SFP+ 10m Direct Attach Copper Cable J9286B
HP X242 SFP+ to SFP+ 15m Direct Attach Copper Cable J9287B

(There are also some SFP+ to XFP DACs available.)

The other HP/H3C cables (for HP servers, storage, Comware switches) do not have J part numbers and also do not work.