Help validating c3000 use with P4000 storage

[chuckk281]

Charles was looking for iSCSI storage assistance:

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My customer wishes to adopt Blades but is confined to a Low Voltage

Datacenter.  I’m concerned with how a c3000 and accompanying BL460 g7

would be used in a iSCSI configuration with a P4300.

This comes down to understanding how the c3000 is wired and how iSCSI

is best supported (VC, Procurve Switch, Cisco switch, etc).  Any help would

be greatly appreciated.

Do we have a White Paper, best practice or just any comments on doing this right.

I’m looking to having 2x c3000 at start, read Jan, and a third one in March/April.

Customer has no 10GE today, but I’m thinking of pushing HPM E2910 switches

Which offer a total of 24 ports in combinations of 20-24 GE plus 0-4 10GE ports.

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Vincent joined in:

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Bonjour Charles,

If the customer cares about redundancy, you’ll need to add a mezz NIC to address the interconnect in bay 2.

Then you need to ask if they want to use software or hardware iSCSI, and iSCSI boot (which requires hardware iSCSI).

We do not have today a 10Gb mezz card that would work in a BL460c G7 and support hardware iSCSI and iSCSI boot. The type of interconnect should be relatively inconsequential to iSCSI itself. Jumbo frames are useful to iSCSI but they all support that. If going with VC, it must be Flex-10 in a c3000, not FlexFabric.

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Charles replied:

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Vince (or other BFS volunteer  ;-)

Its seems you’re saying that the LOM Flex Nic / CNA could deliver 10GE iSCSI

today … but just not via a Mezz card yet.  So I could have one 10GE iSCSI today,

it just wouldn’t be a redundant path ?

Considering that some P4000 implementations use an active 10GE and a

Standby 1GE connection, and If I was to use a VC in Bays 1 & 2 in a c3000,

could I today do the following:

Active Connections:

LOM Flex Nic 1a:     1 Gbps VLAN-Public

LOM Flex Nic 2a:     7 Gbps VLAN-iSCSI

LOM Flex Nic 3a:     1 Gbps VLAN-Mgmt

LOM Flex Nic 4a:     1 Gbps VLAN-VMotion or Other

Passive Connections:

Mezz1 Flex Nic 1a:  1 Gbps VLAN-Public

Mezz1 Flex Nic 2a:  1 Gbps VLAN-iSCSI

Mezz1 Flex Nic 3a:  1 Gbps VLAN-Mgmt

Mezz1 Flex Nic 4a:  1 Gbps VLAN-VMotion or Other

Oh! and since I can’t use a FlexFabric module in a c3000, would the iSCSI need

to be associated with Physical Function 2 ?

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Ramu also had some info:

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Charles

In c3000,

1. Both the embedded NICs (2* 10Gbps) are getting terminated to the interconnect in Bay 1. So your active and passive (or active/active) network connections can be of the same bandwidth.
2. Interconnect level redundancy will not be available in c3000 with above config. If you are looking at interconnect redundancy then additional Mezz card in the server and interconnect module in bay 2 have to be added.
3. Even though FlexFabric module is not supported in c3000 , Flex-10 provides required bandwidth for iSCSI access. Flex-10 works fine with the software iSCSI initiator.
4. Since no VC FF, PF2 association is not required.

Hope all the queries are covered.

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And Vincent added:

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If you want to use software iSCSI, you can do anything you want, it’s entirely transparent for Virtual Connect (or any other interconnect).

If you want to use hardware iSCSI with VC, you can with FlexFabric adapters (NC553i/m with Intel G7), VC Flex-10 modules with firmware >= 3.10, and create specific iSCSI connections in the VC server profile that WILL get mapped to physical function 2 (LOM1:b, MZ1-1:b, etc.)

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Great info. Use it well with your iSCSI storage. Let us know if you have additional experiences with iSCSI.

[Aguirre]

Hi,

Do you know if we can directly connect the P4X00 nodes to the Flex-10 modules ?

ALB bond is still working ?