More info about network monitoring in Virtual Connect.

[chuckk281]

Vincent asked the question:

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Is there any solution to monitor the port performance (downlinks/uplinks) of the VC / VC Flex-10? Thanks.

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Paul responded:

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Hi Vincent

Uplink performance can be monitored at the upstream switch.  One to sixteen downlinks can be mirrored onto an available, unused uplink, and monitored at the upstream switch.

From the HP Virtual Connect for Cisco Network Administrators whitepaper:

SPAN (Port Monitoring)

Virtual Connect supports port monitoring functionality to assist in troubleshooting networking issues for servers connected to the external network through Virtual Connect. VC allows an Administrator to define a single, active port monitoring session per VC domain.

The monitor session must be configured with at least one ‘monitored port’ and a single ‘analyzer port’. The ‘monitor port’ list is the list of server downlinks whose traffic will be mirrored. The ‘analyzer port’ is the VC uplink port that the network analyzer is connected to. VC will mirror the traffic from the monitored ports to the analyzer port.

A Port Monitoring session can mirror the traffic for up to 16 server downlinks to the analyzer port. Any VC uplink can be defined as the analyzer port and any server downlinks can be selected as the monitored port. There is no VC Ethernet module dependency.

Lastly, the Administrator can choose the direction of the traffic to mirror – to the server, from the server, or both.

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Have you used these methods to monitor your VC environment? Thoughts and comments?