Missing essential feature

[Harald_Kreuz]

Hi,

I have a big issue here and I will return to VCEM as long that is not working.

My chassis has 2x 2 10Gbit Uplinks for guest traffic. My blades running ESXi should load-balance network traffic and handle failover themselves.

So on VCEM I created 2 independent Shared uplink sets (one on the left VC module, one on the right VC module).

Then I created each VLAN 2 times eg. VLAN100A (with VLAN ID 100) and VLAN100B (with VLAN ID 100).

I bound the VLAN100A to the first shared uplink set, and VLAN100B to the second.

Within the profile I connected LOM1-1c to VLAN100A and LOM1-2c to VLAN100B.

So I was able to fully use my complete bandwidth (ACTIVE/ACTIVE).

Now in OneView this possibility is gone - I can create only one Network with VLAN ID100 and I can assign it only a single time.

That results into an ACTIVE/PASSIVE configuration, which is a major step back for me.

Maybe I have not found the proper settings yet - but there are not so much options to set.

OneView looks great and I hope that this will be resolved soon.

Because current VCEM configurations can not be imported it's a disruptive change. As soon as my production is fully running there I am not sure if I can implement it easily some time later.

Best regards,

Harry

[ChrisLynch]

Hello, and thank you for your post Harry.  At this time, HP OneView does not support Virtual Connect Active/Active Networking.  Do know that this missing feature has been highly desired.  And while I cannot talk about unreleased products in a public forum, do know this will be resolved.

Is Active/Active an absolute requirement for you?  Will the avialble uplink bandwidth not be sufficient for you by using the Active/Standby design?

[MattGG]

Wow!  I didn't know that you couldn't do this in OneView.

This is the standard best practice config for vSphere.    OneView is useless without it.

-MattGG

[John R Bianchi]

Need some clarification on something I just read.

In the quickspecs the following statement is made in the "What's New" section,

Active-Active configuration support for Virtual Connect reduces oversubscription rates for more predictable server-to-network-core traffic and provides faster link failure detection and failover times.

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/14621_na/14621_na.pdf

I'm guessing that is referring to the relationship between the VC modules and the network switches.  Where as the issue brought up in this discussion is about the relationship between the server/server profile and the VC modules.

I strongly agree with the concern regarding Active-Passive.  We have the exact same situation and use the dual shared uplink with duplicated networks approach to feed our memory dense VMware hosts with the necessary bandwidth.

I'm really happy to finally see an appliance that I can use to replace HPSIM and VCEM (What a nightmare that was to support/keep running).  It definitely is in need of some maturing though.  I look forward to seeing where this goes.

[Jeroen_Kleen]

Hi John,

You did find the Quickspecs of HP OneView 1.05 that will be very soon available. The updated HP OneView 1.05 usersguide will have good instructions including diagrams how to setup VC based active-active configurations and even how to move from an active-standby to an active-active configuration.

So indeed its the configuration that we will allow between VC and upstream switches to become active-active but it will include then as well for server side active-active configurations like heavily used within VMware environments.

Please be patient as the HP OneView 1.05 usersguide will help you on guidance how you can implement Active-active configurations with HP OneView. See for the future this URL: http://www.hp.com/go/OneView/docs

Cheers, Jeroen

[ChrisLynch]

To be clear, we have always provided Server-Side A/A.  It's the Uplinks that 1.00 and 1.01 only provide A/S configuration. 

[Harald_Kreuz]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your reply - it's good to know that A/A is planned.

I know that this might be dangerous and can cause massive network issues if you don't know what you're doing.

The bandwidth is currently not the issue - it's more the situation that I want to control which uplink is used and that failover is only handled within one layer (to remove potential sources for errors/problems).

And I also discovered that I can create an internal VLAN for vMotion without tagging earlier. In OneView this is also not possible because he forces me to enter a VLAN ID (although I don't need one).

Will there be also an improvement some time?

Have a great day - cheers,

Harry

[Bart_Heungens]

Harry,

I had the same 'issue/challenge' in my environment.

Rather easy solution: You have to create a VLAN (for instance 1) but then there is an option at the creation of the uplink sets in the Logical Interconnect Group to set that VLAN as Native... So it will accept also untagged packets...

Have it in production here, works fine...

Kr,

Bart