How Many Ethernet Passthroughs?

[JoJoGabor]

I need to buy a c7000 chassis with 3 blades at this stage configured with 6NICs each. The other blades in the host will only use the 2 onboard NICs. Can I configure these 3 VMware hosts with 4x Ethernet passthrough modules and remap the NICs to use the Ethernet passthroughs in bays 1 - 4.

It seems a real waste if I have to buy 6 Passthrough modules just for these 3 hosts.

THanks for any advice

[Ken Henault]

If they are 1/2 height blades, you need a pass through module for each NIC. There is no remapping within the enclosure. The connections between NICs and the interconnect modules are just traces on a circuit board. This makes the enclosure super reliable. Any remapping capability would just introduce a potential failure point.

[JoJoGabor]

Thanks for your quick answer! So if using a full-height blade does this change the number of Passthrough's required?

[Ken Henault]

See attached. A full height blade has 2 NICs to the modules in bays 1&2, so you can use 4 pass throughs.

[Anna Cheng]

I looked into similar setup myself last year.
I have full height blades on C7000. Each blade has 4 onboard NICs, hence only need 2 passthrough modules (i.e. bay 1 and bay 2).
Therefore technically, 6 NICs will can survive on 4 passthroughs assuming you use 4 onboard NICs + 1 Mezz card.

[Adrian Clint]

JoJo

You need an interconnect for every NIC you want (on half height blades).

Pass-thrus are the cheapest interconnect you can get.

Full height servers use twice the space of a half height so you need to factor in the calc 1/8th the cost of the blade enclosure for a full height rather than 1/16th of a half height.

BL480s are soon to be discontinued, and BL600 series are sooo expensive compared to adding extra pass-thrus.

Go with the extra pass-thrus. Buy 2nd hand if you really want to... they dont really have much to go wrong.