BL460c NIC Port Mapping

[Jeff Gawthorpe]

Hello,
We have recently purchased a bl3000 enclosure with 5 BL460 blades, the enclosure has 2 gbe2c ethernet and 2 brocade 4/12 FC switches. With each blade we bought a quad port NIC and dual port HBA. Our aim was to have 6 NICS per host - 2 for console & vmotion and 4 for VMs. The NIC card is in mezzanine slot 1 and the HBA in slot 2. When I look at the port mapping in HP onboard admin I get confused! Firstly looking at interconnect bay 1 it appears as though there are 4 onboard NICs with 2 being dedicated to network and 2 to iSCSI - see attached jpeg. Secondly if I look at the switch in bay 2 it appears that there are only 2 available NICs in the quad port mez card. I have tried to swap the cards round but got i/o mismatch errors on the console. My question is why can I only see 2 out of 4 NICs in the quad card and why can I see 4 when there should be 2 on the embedded (2 displaying as iSCSI). Is there any way that I can convert the iSCSI ports to plain old ethernet(ESX server is seeing them as iSCSI targets) and if not is there any way that I can realise all of my 4 ports from the quad port NICs? BTW the fc switches are working fine with one port from each blade mapping to each switch.

Many thanks for your help.

Jeff

[Lmm_1]

Hey Jeff,
Regarding the iSCSI, that is part of the embedded NIC (Only 2 Physical ports), those servers has an Embedded Broadcom Multifunction NIC, it provides the option for iSCSI Hardware acceleration (Virtual HBA)on Windows and Linux, so there is actually only 2 Embedded NICs.

Regarding the quad port NIC, you must look at how the port mapping is for this c3000, There is space for 8 half height servers, and the ethernet switch has only 16 downlink ports, meaning that only 2 NICs for each blade will map to the same interconnect.

Having said that, you will need 3 Ethernet switches in order to map all NICs (8 Blades x 6 NIC´s each) and only 1 SAN switch to map the hba´s (8 Server x 2 HBA´s).

If you are gonna use HBA on Mezz slot 1, then the SAN switch must be on bay 2, bay 3 and 4 must be populated with ethernet switches. (See attached picture).

By the way, I guess you are using NC364m, if after moving the interconnects you cannot get the ports to work, I´d suggest to open a support case with HP and have them check your quad port NIC.

[Lmm_1 · Accepted solution]

Found a better picture. Check attachment.

[Jeff Gawthorpe]

Thanks LMM, I appreciate your reply. It's the first time I have used blades so I was confused regarding how the port mapping works. I'm pretty sure that I know how it all works now. Thanks again.

Jeff

[Adrian Clint]

Attached pdf is brilliant for understanding the mapping.

[Jeff Gawthorpe]

Thanks Adrian. That really is a good document. It would be nice if the enclosure shipped with a quick start poster for port mapping. It would have saved me a lot of time!. Many thanks for your time..

Jeff