Assisning switches on Flex-10 Virtual Connect

[JorisK]

Hi everyone,

We have a few BL460c servers with Flex-10 cards installed. Interconnect bay one and two contain two Netflex10 cards which are internally stacked.

I want to assign three virtual networks to Blade servers, in a total of 5 (2 Nics are attached default on the BL460c's + 3 virtual Nics). When i assign them, my nics pop up in VMware as 4 connected and one not.

Is it correct our Netflex cards in our Blades can only connect to two virtual networks?

Many thanks!

[HEM_2]

so first question is about your BL460c servers... Are they G6? If they are not G6 then they do not have NC532i NICs and can't be carved up in to multiple NICs. I.E. maybe you have a BL460c g5 and a 2-port Mezzanine NIC.

If you do have a G6 server then each FlexNIC can be carved up into 4 physical NICs each. This means you could have a total of 8 physical NICs on a BL460c G6.

If you provide a screenshot of your assigned server profile, we could tell what might be happening.

Also make sure your VC fw is at 2.12 to avoid a known blade population issue.

Also, don't forget that even with 2 NICs, you can do VLAN tagging on the NICs so that each one can support multiple VLANs

[JorisK]

Thanks for your reply!

The BL460s are G1 servers, not G6. (This is because we need CPU compatibility between other blades).

The current bay configuration:
Bay1-2: HP VC Flex-10 modules
Bay3-4: Qlogic fibrswitches
Bay5-6: Normal HP gigabit switches.

Since the embedded blade NICs connect to bay 1 and 2 and my Flex-10 mezz cards connect to bay 5 and 5 i tried to plug in the flex modules in both bay 5 and 6, but that results in an invalid configuration, am i right? (i was unable to connect to the VC Manager)

Many thanks for your help!

[HEM_2 · Accepted solution]

yes that would be invalid. At minimum you need VC modules in bay 1 and 2

[JorisK]

Yeah that's what i found out too.

1) I'm i correct, that with the configuration as i said it was there is no way for me to create a 10Gbit network? (because Flex module 1 and 2 connect to the 1Gbit emmbedded Broadcom cards on the blades and the Flex-10 Mezz cards connect to the standard gigabit switches on bay 5 and 6?)

2) To resolve this issue without having to replace the blades: is it correct when i attach two more VC Flex-10 modules in bay 5 and 6 i would be able to setup 2 Virtual Networks running at 10Gbit?

3) We currently have 2 VC Flex-10 modules automaticly stacked. I read on the HP site the modules are active/standby, is this correct? If so, is there a way to get them active/active to run at 20Gbit?

Regards,
Joris

[NXS]

switch the flex -10 modules to slot 5-6 if not other server has onboard the 10 GB nic (only bl495c G5/G6 ob Bl460g6).
And you will have your 2x10GB if you have a 10GB mezz in slot2 of the blades.
The flex-10 management tool is active standby

K

[JorisK]

When placing the two Flex-10 modules in bay 5/6 the VC Manager becomes unavailible. Also, the HP documentation states that playing Flex-10 modules only in bay 5 and 6 is not a correct setup.

[NXS]

replace the servers with modules who have a internal 10GB connection or add 2 flex-10 modules

[JorisK]

Thanks, that's a confirmation of what my idea.

[rick jones]

It is always a good idea to use the more full/unique name for NICs since there can be so many. That is especially true today for "Flex-10" given there are currently two Flex-10 add-on mezzanine cards these days:

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/networking/nc522m/index.html

and

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/networking/nc532m/index.html