Flex-10 Server Profile - understanding how many NICS are presented

[Jeffrey]

Hi everyone I'm very new to VC, and there is something which I would like to clarify if it's the normal behaviour. I have defined a new server profile in VC manager, and left it as the default 2 connections (blade is using flex-10 NICs bl490c). However, when I load the OS, I see 8 nics, even though my profile only has 2 defined and assigned. Looking at the device bay information, it shows LOM:1-a and LOM:2-a defined as expected, but LOM1-b, 1-c, 1-d and 2-b, 2-c, 2-d are still present with MAC Address of "Server Factory Default". Is this normal and expected, i.e. I will still see the remainder unused NICS from the OS, and I just need to ignore them? Thanks in advance for any tips :) Regards Jeffrey

[Alex Haddock]

Hi Jeffrey. Yep, normal behaviour. The NICs will always be there but you can ignore them and assign bandwidth across the NICs you want to use. Cheers, Alex

[julianwood]

Is there a way to remove these Nics and only have 2? As I see it without shared uplink sets you can't allocate bandwidth to these anyway so having 8 Nics or 2 means the same in terms of bandwidth so I would rather just have 2 as it is simpler for support people to understand.

[Jeffrey]

Hi Alex Thanks for the assurance :) Now as Julian mentioned, it would be good if it can be hidden from view totally so that the server admins don't make a fuss :D

[Alex Haddock]

Hi both. I don't believe that there is any way to hide them from the VC side. So long as there is a Flex-10 module in the bay they will always enumerate 4 NICs per port. This is hardware based and can't be changed so I agree there will be some education needed there. The benefit of course is that the multiple NICs and speeds don't require fancy drivers and the like as used by some competing solutions. The Shared Uplink Set type shouldn't impact on the Flex-NIC bandwidth allocation. It is basically a hardware flow control.