Virtual Connect Expanded VLAN : Is there a downtime or a risk to activate more?

[chuckk281]

Arnaud had a customer question:

***************

What we need, is to activate the feature “Expanded VLAN” on our virtual connect. We didn’t found any documentation explaining the risks of this. Can we do this in production? Is there a downtime or a risk?

In the cookbook file released by HP, they speak about a capacity limit of 162 VLANs mapped and they gave an example of VLANs  repartition.

We would like to know how can we count the totality of VLANs Mapped.

In the cookbook they speak about  “162 VLANs are allowed per physical server port”, what is a physical server port? Is it the the network port that we add in the server profile, is it a physical port on virtual connect or is it something else on the virtual connect?

Cookbook file: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c02616817/c02616817.pdf

ð  Page 12

If we enable this feature, will we see a counter that allow us to know how many VLANs are mapped? (like we have now for the the Legacy VLANs)

Is it possible to over mapped VLANs: more than 162? What is the risk if we do (is it blocked?)?

**************

Reply from Dave:

************

I have not had a site go that far yet, but here is what I see when creating more than 162 VLANs.

Here is what is seen when applying VLANs to a profile port, using the Multiple networks,

*************

So, it looks like you get an error message not allowing more than 162 VLANs per port. Any comments?

[JayJay42]

That sounds like how I would have guessed it would work.  With the legacy method that's exactly how it works and limits each virtual NIC to 28 VLANs much like the screenshot.  However, in the description for the VLAN Capacity it states "you can configure 162 VLANs on an Ethernet connection that gets allocated to FlexNIC-a.  This means that no additional networks can be added to FlexNIC-b, FlexNIC-c, or FlexNIC-d."  That makes it sound like it's 162 total VLANs per blade.  If that's so with the legacy method I can have six NICs with 28 VLANs each totalling 168 VLANs whereas with the new method it caps it at 162.  Is this correct?

I thought it would be 162 per NIC but that last line seems to contradict this notion.

[Server-Support]

I'd love to know if adding new VLAN or configuring the existing VLAN does not need any outage for each of the Blade server affected ?

[abelmc]

Per what I see below, no more than 162 or 168 VLANs (with legacy capacity) are allowed. Is there any other way to add up more VLANs per Blade?