Configuration question c3000 with Virtual Connect

[Tyson]

Note: I posted this on the general Bladesystem forum yesterday. Reposting it here since it appears to be the right forum. Sorry for not seeing it yesterday.

I've been pulling my hair out trying to get our new virtual connect switches to work. I'm hoping someone can shed some light on what is going wrong.

First off, I have read a good amount of documentation including the HP Virtual Connect Ethernet Cookbook third edition.

Here is my hardware environment.

I have a c3000 enclosure.

The blades I'm testing with are HP ProLiant BL465c G7 blades. They are using the LOM for ethernet connectivity. I have a HBA for SAN connectivity in Mez 2 but that is connecting through passthru modules so I don't think they matter for my ethernet settings.

In Interconnect Bay 1 is a HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 Ethernet Module.

In Interconnect Bays 3 and 4 I have FC passthru modules for SAN connectivity.

Upstream networking are a pair of Nexus 2232 fabric extenders (which are connected to a Nexus 5k). We have two copper 10g links to each of the upstream switches for a total upstream bandwidth of 40gb.

What I'm trying to do is to merge the uplinks for one big 40gb pipe. To the pipe I want to connect LOM-1a and LOM-2a which I will then attach in ESX to get 20gb bandwidth for each blade. We have a number of VLANs each server will access (30 or so) and plan on using VLAN tagging to do this.

Here is my configuration in VCM

Tunnel Mode

One vNet with Enable VLAN Tunneling checked and all four uplink ports added. Connection mode set to Auto.

Server profile is assigned to each blade (using one currently will expand once it works) with the vNet assigned to Ports 1 and 2.

Seems simple enough but it doesn't seem to work. What is happening is that I'm getting inconsistent ping results from the blade (ESXi 4.1 is installed). When I first boot the blade I can ping from the blade but not to the blade. After a few minutes I stop being able to ping from the blade too.

I'm pretty much a networking novice. I've talked with my networking folks during the initial configuration of the uplink ports. Right now I'm thinking there may be a problem upstream from me but I want to make sure my configuration looks good before telling them their setup has issues.

Thanks for any help you can provide. Let me know if more information would be good.

[Tyson]

Here is my output from running 'show all' on the CLI.

Making it an attachment due t post size limit.

[Tyson]

Noone has any insight? Can someone at least say if my config looks right so I can focus elserwhere?

[Bart_Heungens]

Hi,

Take a look at this document: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01386629/c01386629.pdf

Virtual COnnect for the Cisco Administrator

Please check all settings first here...

Can U make some kind of simple drazing of how all is connected? A picture says more than a big txt file to analyze...

[Mark Wibaux]

My best guess would be that you need to get the networking guys to configure a Virtual Port Channel (VPC) on the 4 links from the Ciscos to the VC module. The VPC will need to be setup as a LACP port channel.

Once this is done you should see in the VC Manager the 4 links are now all active.

Also based on past experience I would make sure you are running the latest firmware for the CNA card in the servers. The firmware for these inbuilt LOM cards is not handled by the Standard HP Firmware DVD, you need to either  virtual mount the specific CNA firmware ISO image or create the CD and boot that. Also once this is done make sure you are running the latest ESX drivers for the CNA's.