First Blade Enclosure Purchase

[KB17]

I am looking to purchase our first Blade Enclosure / Blade Servers.
Besides the blade servers and the C7000 enclosure, what are the other items I will have to purchase to get this up and running?
I believe the c7000 does not come with any ethernet connections. So I have to purchase something like this, just to get connectivity.

HP 1Gb Ethernet Pass-Thru Module - expansion module - 16 ports
Product ID
Mfg. Part: 406740-B21
UNSPSC: 43201404

Are there any other items that you don't normally have to worry about when buying a basic Proliant server, that you do have to when moving to Blades?

[Andrew_Read]

I'm no expert, so I hope others will fill in the gaps.

We have just purchased a couple of enclosures, so I'll share the decisions points we encountered and our choices (in brackets)

1: Redundant Onboard administrator or not? (yes)

2: Fully populate with Fans and Power Supplies or not. (Yes)

3: Pass-through Ethernet versus Virtual Connect versus blade switch. (Virtual Connect).

4: If you're connecting to Fibre Based storage: Pass-through versus Virtual conenct versus internal switch. (Virtual Connect)

5: Do you need more than two Nic's on a half height, if so, a second set of Pass-through/VC/switchs will be needed.

So far I'm happy with the decisions we've made, but each environment is different.

The virtual connects take a little time to get you're head around, but there is some good documentation available. They reduce the cabling requirements significantly over pass-through.

Regards,

Andrew

[KB17]

Hey Andrew,
Thanks for the reply.
Those answers helped quite a bit.
Like you said, the virtual connects were a little difficult to understand.
It's just a different way of setting up servers, and there are some things we weren't used to thinking about purchasing that we now have to.

[Igor Karasik]

We use Virtual connect in all our enclosures and we are very happy.
One more point about First Blade Enclosure purchase - you can choose 3-Phase or Single Phase enclosure power.
On sites where we have 3-Phase power available we buy 3-Phase enclosure.
Bear in mind that Blades servers don't have option to DVD drive, but you can connect external DVD drive to Onboard Administrator. We buy external DVD drive with each enclosure
and it can be very useful when you want to do updates on all Blades in enclosure simultaneously.