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Re: Couple of questions in regards to HP C7000 enclosure and VC FF

 
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akash1980
Advisor

Couple of questions in regards to HP C7000 enclosure and VC FF

Hi Guys,

 

Can someone confirm couple of things for me?

 

- Is there any way to distribute bandwidth for various blades within enclosure? or it's automatic, we cannot control?

Here I am not talking about distributing bandwidth for various nics within blade.

- If we have total 2 uplinks for VC FF, each 10 GB, how VC FF distribute bandwidth to various blades (not NICs) in enclosure?

-Last question, if we have 3 eth uplinks and 3 FC uplinks per VC Flexfabric and blade has just 2 LOM ports no Mez cards, how many Flexnics and FlexHBAs each blade can see? Do we need to add a Mez card to utilise 3rd uplink?

 

Regards,

 

J

http://virtualcloudzz.blogspot.com.au/

 

6 REPLIES 6
TVVJ
HPE Pro
Solution

Re: Couple of questions in regards to HP C7000 enclosure and VC FF

HP Virtual Connect technology enables network traffic aggregation rather than allocating bandwidth to individual server blades.

 

Flex-10 enables splitting a single 10G NIC into four separate physical functions.

 

FlexFabric allows aggregating Ethernet, Fibre Channel, accelerated iSCSI over a single physical FlexFabric NIC. It further partitions a 10 Gb adapter port into four physical functions with adjustable bandwidth per physical function and preserve routing information for all data types.

 

The VC FlexFabric module has 16 individually configurable downlink ports internally facing the servers. For information on port mapping, please refer to section “Virtual connect FlexFabric Uplink Port Mappings” on page 10/100, in the Virtual Connect FlexFabric Cookbook. Click here to access the cookbook.

 

Regards,

 

Vijayasarathy

I work for HPE
Views expressed herein are my personal opinion and are not the views of HPE

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Robert_Jewell
Honored Contributor

Re: Couple of questions in regards to HP C7000 enclosure and VC FF

> Is there any way to distribute bandwidth for various blades within enclosure?

 

Connections from the blade (on board ports or ports from mezzanine cards) to the interconnect modules are handled through dedicated data lines over the enclosure midplanes.  Excepting a few shared links between adjacent interconnect bays, each port has its own data connection.

 

It would be the interconnect module that would handle data distribution and how that is done depends on the module type.

 

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00816246/c00816246.pdf

 

-Bob

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akash1980
Advisor

Re: Couple of questions in regards to HP C7000 enclosure and VC FF

Thank you Vijayasarathy and Bob for your reply.

 

Your referred document led to another question :-)

 

As per Figure 9: HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosure port mapping of half-height server blades to interconnect bays

If I need to use Mez cards, do I need to have more than two interconnect modules? I am asking this question because, in figure, 3 and 4 interconnect modules are connected to Mez 1.

 

If we have 3 eth uplinks and 3 FC uplinks per VC Flexfabric and blade has just 2 LOM ports no Mez cards, how many Flexnics and FlexHBAs each blade can see? Do we need to add a Mez card to utilize 3rd uplink?

 

Regards..

Matti_Kurkela
Honored Contributor

Re: Couple of questions in regards to HP C7000 enclosure and VC FF

As Vijayasarathy said, each LOM connected to a FlexFabric will appear as four functional units, each of which can be used as a FlexNIC. Functional unit #2 on each LOM can be used as either FlexHBA or a FlexNIC.

 

So each blade will see a total of 8 functional units using just the LOMs, no Mez cards needed. This number is not dependent on the number of FlexFabric uplinks used.

 

Each Ethernet uplink can bring in multiple VLANS in tagged mode, and by configuring the VC Flexfabric, you can choose which of those VLANs each FlexNIC will see. For each FlexNIC in each blade, you can either assign a single VLAN in untagged mode, or a set of VLANs in tagged mode. Even in tagged mode, you can restrict the set of VLANs a FlexNIC can see to a selected subset of what VLANs are available through the VC Flexfabric uplinks.

 

See Figure 80 in the cookbook document for an advanced configuration example: a single half-height blade with only the 2 default LOMs is receiving a total of 55 VLANs and a FCoE SAN connection... and it still has two FlexNICs free for future assignment. The trunked set of 2 uplinks per FlexFabric are used to deliver a total of 355 different VLANs to the VC FlexFabric modules.

MK
akash1980
Advisor

Re: Couple of questions in regards to HP C7000 enclosure and VC FF

Appreciate your reply MK, Thanks. but my questions are not answered. .

 

""As Vijayasarathy said, each LOM connected to a FlexFabric will appear as four functional units, each of which can be used as a FlexNIC. Functional unit #2 on each LOM can be used as either FlexHBA or a FlexNIC.""

 

Contnuation to this, Can you confirm following?

 

If there are no Mez cards on the servers other than dual port LOM, we can’t add more than 8 FlexNICs. Is it correct?

If we need to use one more uplink port per FF module and make use of newly added uplink at blade level, Is mez card is mandatory?

 

SwisspostIT
Valued Contributor

Re: Couple of questions in regards to HP C7000 enclosure and VC FF

if you have mezzanine cards in your bladeserver, the connection in the backplane is as follow:

Mezz Card 1 --> Interconnect Bay 3 & 4

Mezz Card 2 --> Interconnect Bay 5 & 6

 

So yes, if you have mezzanine cards in blades, you'll need more than 2 interconnect modules!

 

Regards,

Ville