Stacking within single enclosure.

[chuckk281]

Avi had a stacking question for Virtual Connect modules:

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Today I saw at customer site the following configuration:

Bay 1&2 Flex10 , Bay 3&4 VCFC , Bay5&6 Flex10.

There was no stacking between bays 1&2 and 5&6, Just the internal stack ports 7&8.

In VCM there is an error on stacking tab, but customer says that he work like this for several month.

There are uplinks on all the Flex’s and profile nics  connected to those uplinks.

So , what exactly the usage of stacking within the enclosure ?

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Input from Samuel:

Stacking links can provide network redundancy between non-adjacent Virtual Connect Ethernet modules in the same enclosure, and the features listed below.

Virtual Connect User guide [See bottom of page 8 in the 3.30]:

http://bizsupport1.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c02996013/c02996013.pdf

“By stacking (cabling) the VC-Enet modules together within the domain and connecting the VC-FC or FlexFabric module FC uplinks on the same bay of all enclosures to the same FC switch, every server blade in the domain can be configured to access any external network or fabric connection. With this configuration, you can use VCM to deploy and migrate a server blade profile to any server in the Virtual Connect domain without changing external LAN or SAN configurations.”

And comments from Chris:

Stacking Links are used to extend the L2 topology within the Domain.  So, if you have a NIC port that maps to a downlink in Bay 1, yet the uplinks that are active for the assigned network are out of Bay 5, there is no L2 path for VC to forward the traffic from Bay 1 to Bay 5.  Plus, there is no way to disable the Stacking Link alarm, and is technically unsupported.  To be in a supported configuration, an external Stacking Link must be installed.

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Questions?