HP 4Gb Virtual Connect Fibre Channel Module vs. HP Virtual Connect 4Gb FC Module

[Dave..B]

Anyone know of a cheat sheet or somethign that lists the differences between these two models and maybe some best practices for setting up the fabrics in the VC domain? I'm not clear on if the servers/bays are mapped to specific uplink ports or how the Dynamic Login Balancing fits into all this.
Thanks!

[kris rombauts · Accepted solution]

Hi Dave,

- the "HP Virtual Connect 4Gb Fibre Channel Module" is the newer version (2nd generation)of the HP-4Gb virtual connect FC module and has these enhancements :

Allows up to 128 virtual machines running on the same physical server to access separate storage resources. Provisioned storage resource is associated directly to a specific virtual machine - even if the virtual server is re-allocated within the BladeSystem. Storage management is no longer constrained to a single physical HBA on a server blade.

This is taken from :
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/blades/components/fibrechannel/vc/index.html

The original module cannot get these newer features via a f/w upgrade, it's a 2nd generation of the product and it has an other productnumber (409513-b22).



- there is no fixed relation between a server FC port and the four uplink ports on the VC FC module to the SAN so to speak, it depends what uplink port you picked when you created your SAN fabric in the VC manager and what login distribution method you chose. If you want a uplink port that is fixed then you need to choose static (non default), if you want a more high available configuration with uplink redundancy then you need to choose for dynamic (default) and assign more then one uplink port in your SAN fabric configuration.

Here is a good explanation of the uplinks :
(page 129 onwards)
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00865618/c00865618.pdf?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

In previous versions of Virtual Connect, a one-to-one relationship existed between VC-FC uplinks and external FC SAN fabrics. Beginning with version 1.31 of Virtual Connect Manager, users can group multiple VC-FC module uplinks logically into a Virtual Connect fabric when attached to the same Fibre Channel SAN fabric. Using this feature, users can access more than one FC SAN fabric in their datacenter, plus have a flexible and fully redundant way to connect server blades to Fibre Channel SANs.
Now a user can connect to up to four SAN fabrics from one VC-FC module


HTH

Kris

[UK-Blr]

i beleive both are same.

More info on VC modules - http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/blades/components/c-class-interconnects.html

[kris rombauts]

The modules are not the same, (this is why the product naming and product number changed slightly to differentiate them). The newest one is a second generation of the 4 Gb VC FC interconnect module and has some enhanced features as mentioned above, mainly related to NPIV which are not available in the first generation.


Kris

[Dave..B]

Thank you Kris! The documentation was pretty weak and confusing when it went talking about dynamic, to static, back to dynamic in the pages you pointed out. But you confirmed my initial thoughts.

[Dave..B]

answered by kris