Advice on setting up new blade systems

[Steven Clementi]

I would definitely make the changes suggested... fibre in mezz 1 and nic in mezz 2 for easier restructuring later on.


It will make life simpler later on.

The only comment I have is that I would probably pair the 2 nics and use them for management/vmotion rather then splte them. Redundancy is more important in my eyes and running both on the same connection is acceptable in small environments.

The only thing I would do is use 1 onboard nic and 1 mezz nic as the first pair, then use the other onboard and other mezz nic as the other pair... so that you are covered incase the mezz card dies for some reason. I haven't seen one die yet.


Steven

[Mike O.]

I've already moved the interconnects and will put the mezzanine cards as suggested.

Thanks again.

[Steven Clementi]

Mike:

You should not need to use the uplink ports for anything. They are there mostly for trubleshooting problems.

double check your IP settings. Directly attach the server to the OA if you have to using a cross over cable to make sure they can talk to each other properly.

Generally speaking, the networking is usually at fault 75% of the time. (or more). They swear up and down that everything is right on their side.... until they actually check it.


Steven

[Mike O.]

So the port directly on the OA can handle the HTTP page properly, correct? It just seemed odd that the connectivity seemed to be OK according to PING until I tried to send the web info through it.

I was able to get to the login screen once, but while I was typing in the credentials, the connection started timing out.

I;ve been able to connect in fine and run the web page and wizards using the uplink connection.

One more related question: Normally our default gateway is the ".1" entry on each subnet. However, since this subnet they set up isn't routed out anywhere, there is no gateway IP defined. Will this cause any problems for any of the devices if I leave the default gateway blank, or set it to 10.5.100.1?

[Mike O.]

It looks like I've got it working now..
I checked with our network group, they said that everything was OK at their end.

However, they may be right (at least this time). Using the uplink 169.254.x.x port, I ran the first time setup on the one chassis. I configured the OA modules using the IP's that I had been setting through the front panel. When the wizard completed, I disconnected the uplink port and connected through the regular IP on the OA. It's working fine now. I'm not sure what was different by setting it up that way, but at this point as long as it's working...

[Mike O.]

Now that the OA connectivity is working, I've been doing the firmware updates. The OA was already at 2.32, so I didn't have to do any on them. I used the Virtual Connect Support Utility to push out firmware 2.01 to the VC ENet modules (1.30 to the VCFC). The update ran and updated the ENet ones, but "failed" on the Fiber Channel ones. After some more research, I reset each VCFC module (nothing it using them yet), then re-ran the utility and they updated to 1.30 OK.

I'm now working on the blades. I have a question about placement of the blades themselves. We're starting out with 5 blades per chassis. Would I do better to put all 5 adjacent to each other, or space the blades out in the chassis? I was thinking that by spacing out the blades, it will spread the heat load out on the fans so that they'll all run at a fairly even speed, instead of some at higher and the others low.

[damiri]

Mike,

as per HP documentation, you should be able to cool down c-7000 fully packet with the set of fans supplied with it. From this point, it really does not matter where do you put your blades if you are not talking about adding some storage or pci blades later on ...

[Mike O.]

Thanks. We're not planning on anything except server blades. I just thought it might be better to spread out the load instead of having a few of the fans blasting out at high speed and the others pretty much on idle.