C3000 Enclosure - Interconnect Question (noob)

[JohnnyMack]

Hi there,

I'm very new to the world of blades. My company has recently pruchased a C300 enclosure and we are in the process of setting up 3 x  Proliant BL460c G7s as vmware ESX hosts.  In addition to the onboard NICs we've also added the following mezzanine cards to each BL460c

1 x HP NC382m Dual Port 1GbE Multifunction BL-c Adapter

1 x NC325m Quad Port 1Gb NIC for c-Class BladeSystem

From what I have read the NC382m should provide 2 x additional NICs and the NC325m x 4. This should give us a total of 8 nics per server. However we only have 6 x nic's showing up within the Port Mapping area related to the BL460c within the onboard administrator.

We have three of the following interconnects installed in Bays 1-3

HP 1Gb Ethernet Pass-Thru Module for c-Class BladeSystem

From what I can gather each pass-thru module provides simply that, in a fixed configuration. So a BL460c in Bay 1 will map to ports 1 and 9 on each interconnect, Bay 2 to 2 and 10 and so on. Which should mean that we'll need a fourth interconnect to enable all 8 NICs on each of the BLc's.

My question is, Is this assumption correct?

Also if anyone could point me in the direction of information on getting started or using the encloure with vmware i would be very grateful.

Many Thanks

J Mack 

[Bart_Heungens]

Hi,

Correct, you will need a 4th interconnect module in the 4th slot at the back to have the 3rd and 4th port of the 2nd mezannine port get out of the enclosure...

For VMware I suggest to download the October HP version of ESXi which is the same image like VMware itself except that the latest HP drivers and CIM providers (for monitoring) are inserted in this image...

Installation itself is fairly simple. Connect to the ILO of the blades, mount the ISO file and boot the server...

Did already a lot of these kind of installations, piece of cake...

Kr,

Bart

[JohnnyMack]

Thanks Bart, much appreciated.

j mack.