Auto-Port Aggregation and Virtual Connect Question

[chuckk281]

A question from Aniekan:

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HP APA can be set up in one of four modes: manual, auto w/PAgP, auto w/LACP and LAN monitor.

Virtual Connect does not support “port channel” on the downlink side.

What APA mode is support by Virtual Connect, if any?

I am particularly interested in the LAN monitor mode.

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First of all a description of HP Auto-Port Agregation:DESCRIPTION
       HP APA, the HP link aggregate or trunking product, provides the ability
       to logically group two or more physical network ports into a single Fat
       Pipe, often called a Network traffic is load balanced across all of the
       links  in  the  aggregation,  which allows you to build large bandwidth
       logical links into the server that are highly available and  completely
       transparent to the client and server applications.  HP APA is available
       for HP-UX 11i V1, V2 and V3.

       In addition to increased performance, enterprise users require  protec-
       tion  against  business interruptions and loss of productivity. HP APA
       features automatic link failure detection and the ability  to  transfer
       traffic to  one  of the redundant links in a specified failover group.
       This is done transparently to  the  applications  to  ensure  a highly
       available environment.

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Input from Chris:

Isn’t LAN Monitor another way of saying “Network Fault Tolerant”?  If so, that is the only method supported.  There is an unsupported mode that mimics Transmit Load Balance, but I don’t remember what it’s called and I know that HP-UX GCC folks will not support that mode.

And some info from Marc:

“…You CAN use the LAN Monitor feature of HP-UX APA to form High Availability Failover Groups to provide redundancy. In such a configuration, only one port is active at a time. This will work with no specific configuration in the VC module as long as the ports in question are on the same network/vlan…”

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Comments or questions?