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HP c7000 Blade Enclosures, GbE2c Blade switches and Multicasting

 
Mike Rother
Advisor

HP c7000 Blade Enclosures, GbE2c Blade switches and Multicasting

Hello,
I am new to HP blade switch configuration.

We have 2 HP c7000 Blade Enclosures with 15
ProLiant BL460c G6.
The Enclosures are equipped with GbE2c Layer 2/3 Blade Switches which have actual firmware.

Now we connect one of the copper ports of the Blade switch (nothing configured on the switch) to a Juniper EX3200 Gigabit Copper switch.

Link is up, pinging the Blades from another HP Server connected to the Juniper works fine.

When we try to use Ghost Server to push Images on the Blades, we have not managed to get this multicasting working by now.

Does anybody have a suggestion on how to get the multicasted imaging service to run?

Is there anything needed to be configured on the Blade Swtiches to make multicasting via it work?

Any suggestion on solving this or troubleshooting highly appreciated.

Thanks in advantage and kind regards
Mike

7 REPLIES 7
Adrian Clint
Honored Contributor

Re: HP c7000 Blade Enclosures, GbE2c Blade switches and Multicasting

Mike,

I dont think so, but I'm not sure.
Also check the switch forum site and see if there have been any similar questions.
http://www.bladeconnect.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewforum&f=3
HEM_2
Honored Contributor

Re: HP c7000 Blade Enclosures, GbE2c Blade switches and Multicasting

The default config of gbe2c L2/3 switches is that every port is in VLAN 1 and IGMP snooping is disabled. This means that Multicast traffic will be flooded to all ports of the GBE2c.

So, to answer the question, No, nothing needs to be configured on the GBE2c's in order for multicast to work.

Do the servers PXE Boot OK?

to eliminate any possible GBE2c bugs you might try going to fw version 2.0.60:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodNameId=3352726&prodTypeId=3709945&prodSeriesId=3352717&swLang=13&taskId=135&swEnvOID=1005
Mike Rother
Advisor

Re: HP c7000 Blade Enclosures, GbE2c Blade switches and Multicasting

Hello Adrian and HEM,

thanks for your input, I had a look in the Blade Switch forum, found nothing helpful so far - but anyway, thanks for pointing out the forum, it may get useful resource in the future.

Regarding the Info from HEM:
As I always try everything to solve problems myself before opening a Thread, I have upgraded all components (Enclosures, OA, Bladeswitches, Blades and BLade ILOs to the recent software versions.
Thanks for clarifying the default config and its meaning, good to know this.

When the guy responsible for the imaging is back tomorrow, we will give it a try and I will come back with feedback on the results then.
Of course I will know at this time whether PXE booting works or not.

kind regards
Mike
Mike Rother
Advisor

Re: HP c7000 Blade Enclosures, GbE2c Blade switches and Multicasting

Hello,

got info from the guy responsible for the deployment of the images from the ghost server to the blades:

PXE works perfectly fine.

When talking to a guy doing extreme switches, he told me:
To me it seems that the Blade Switch is not distributing the Ghost console's IGMP session stream beyond it's internal multicast router - check this.

Furthermore he told me that he wonders a lot about the GbE2c having multicast forwarding enabled by default.
He claimed that according to his experience this is not the case by default on most switches.

Unfortunately I was not able to find any section in the manuals for the GbE2c where this is explained - neither how to check if it is the case, nor how to make the GbE2c distributing the IGMP session stream across it's internal multicast router - if there is one...

When I try the multicasting server (same one as the one used with the blades) with a non-managed tiny netgear desktop switch and some workstations it works - so the server seems to work ok.

Any idea/suggestion?

kind regards
Mike
HEM_2
Honored Contributor

Re: HP c7000 Blade Enclosures, GbE2c Blade switches and Multicasting

Mike,

I can guarantee that IGMP Snooping is not turned on in the GBE2c by default. Therefore any IGMP Joins that the client issues are forwarded out to the GBE2c uplink at which point if the Juniper is running IGMP Snooping, that port will be added to the IGMP group and receive multicast for that multicast stream. If nothing is running IGMP snooping then the join is irrelevant as the client will receive all multicast traffic for the VLAN.

Is the Ghost Multicast Server on the same VLAN as the blades? If not, Multicast routing needs to be configured on your Routers or L3 interfaces on switches.

Mike Rother
Advisor

Re: HP c7000 Blade Enclosures, GbE2c Blade switches and Multicasting

Hello HEM,

thanks for your reply, I was down with flu but now be back in the office.

I checked if IGMP snooping has been switched on at the GBE2c, and found that it is disabled - so there should be no problem.

I'm back the fist day at work and will try to make sure that IGMP Snooping is disabled at the Juniper, too.

The Ghost Multicast Server is on the same VLAN, it is directly connected to one of the Juniper Switches ports.

I will come back with results ASAP.
Thanks and kind regards
Mike
Mike Rother
Advisor

Re: HP c7000 Blade Enclosures, GbE2c Blade switches and Multicasting

Hello HEM,

your suggestion made my day!

Checking on the Juniper Switch, I found that IGMP is enabled by default for all ports/VLANs.

On the switches we used before, it was disabled by default and I have missed to realize that it may be different on other vendors switches.

Turning off IGMP snooping made ghost imaging work fast and reliable.

Thanks a lot and kind regards
Mike