Confguring bl460G9 on C7000 G2 without VC

[RoshanHalan]

Hi,

We are adding additional blades (bl460 G9 with HP FlexFabric 10Gb 2-port 536FLB Adapter)  to our C7000 G2 which has bl460 G6 already. We do not have VC on this chassis. We use CISCO 3020 .  Is VC Mandatory to configure BL460 G9 ?  We are installing ESXi and we need 4 nic.  

[peyrache]

hi

yes or not ..

vc must be present to create additionnal nics in your case , without vc you can see only 2 port nic

from ESXI in your configuration

JY

[Michal Doležal]

You are limited only to 1 or two gigabit ports (2 if you have two 3020s) so no VC required.

Four ports can be achieved only with additional mezzanine card with appropriate additional interconnect.

BUT......

In case you will upgrade to some different switch (for example fabric extender for Nexus, or HP 6125XLG, or 6127XLG) with 10Gbe links to the internal ports..... you will have one thing available:

nc536m is Qlogic card and here it is possible to use NPAR technology which can divide both 10G ports to 8 partitions. Only one thing required, on the switch tagging (switchport mode trunk) usually must be enabled to divide management, vMotion and data connectivity into separate VLANs.

NPAR is supported so go to the BIOS (F9) and run the integrated configurator for the card (you will see both nic ports). You must configure it for both.

It is required to configure all eight ports but you can limit speed to each virtual port.

After this you will see in VMWare eight ports and you can configure those as you want. My recommendation is to use six card if you are not using iSCSI as storage.  2x with 1G speed for management, 2x4Gbit for vMotion (can be less if you are not using so much memory and IO is not so intensive) and rest so 2x5Gbit for DATA.

[peyrache]

replacing Cisco3020 by Virtual Connect will be the easy way

all ethernet nic needed will configured under VC profile and applied to the server , so really simple to do

played in  both NPAR/VC configuration  

JY