Blade Clustering

[Ogaily]

Greetings,
I'm new with HP Blade systems and i need help.

My company is installing new blade systems with MSA 2312fc storage. we have 2 Blade enclosures 7000c and each enclosure has 6 servers BL480c and BL460c with 2 HP 1/10Gb VC-Enet Module Opt Kits and 2 HP Virtual Connect 4Gb FC Opt Kits.

The operating system used is windows 2003, and it is required that each server to be clustered with a server on the second enclosure.

would you please provide me with guidelines for performing the clustering.

Thank you.
Yours,
Zaid

[JonathanT]

Hi Zaid,

Well your first order of business is going to be setting up the blades so that they can see each other on the network and see the shared storage. So this means you should have redundant switches interconnecting the VC 1/10 modules (I'm using Dell PowerConnect 6248 in a stacking configuration). If you're never configured VC ethernet then you've got to lookup the Virtual Connect Cookbook on Google and follow those scenarios. It's a step by step life saver.

As for the storage I'm not a fiber channel guru, but the basically you're going to want to configure the virtual connect FC so that the blades see the storage as well. From there follow the clustering installation guidelines of whatever application and OS you're going to cluster.

[Ogaily]

Thank you Jonathan for your response.

I downloaded the cookbook and it is really good and easy to follow.
We do have redundant switches for this task.

I will concentrate first on the VC then I will go to the Storage and its connectivity later I will tackle the clustering issue.

Thank you