Virtual connect uplinks question

[gumba128]

Hello.

I'm new to virtual connect so I have started reading the VC for dummies and a question popped up. It's my understanding that each port on a blade is 10Gigs so 20 Gigs total? But good practice is to use one port on one interconnect and another to the other interconnect. I'm just having a hard time grasping how a port is split into 4 flexnics with a combined total of 10 gigs yet I may have only 1 10gig uplink port to my switch? wouldn't that one blade take up all the bandwidth? I'm just trying to understand how many ports in the back of the flexfabric inteconnect need to be connected to 10gig switch. For example let's say I have 1 10gig uplink going from my interconnect to my swtch and I have two blades with each having a combined possible bandwidth of 10 GIG, wouldn't there be contention because I only have 10 gigs coming in?

[Psychonaut]

You are correct in your thinking, it's 20Gb between the two LOMs.  

The connections are printed on the midplane, so LOM1 goes to Bay1 and LOM2 goes to Bay 2.  So you do have to have two interconnects.

HP seems to have baked in some wicked aggregation into the modules.  I've got 40GbE between almost 60 servers in a stacked domain and I'm not even seeing 3GbE of traffic out of any of my links.

Also keep in mind - just because you've assigned 10Gb to a server, it doesn't mean it's using all of it.  Usually it's just a fraction.  And if the server is communicating to another server in the same chassis if the subnets are the same shared and all of that jazz the traffic never leaves the chassis.

[gumba128]

Thanks for the explanation. My intentions are to use about 5 g7 blades and about 35 virtual machines running on them. My vmware environment is currently running on IBM blades with all the vm's sharing 6 dvuplinks. What do you guys suggest I need when I move to virtual connect HP?

[Psychonaut]

Are you using FC, iSCSI or FCoE for storage?

[gumba128]

FC for storage

[Psychonaut · Accepted solution]

I'd start with one 10GbE connection in each interconnect in an Active/Active configuration and keep an eye on your stats.  If that doesn't look to be enough you can always add another 10GbE UpLink, to one or both sides.

[gumba128]

Thanks for your Help