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Etherchannelling betw. VC Chassis and TWO Cisco Switches

 
Kevin Rounce
New Member

Etherchannelling betw. VC Chassis and TWO Cisco Switches

Hi All

My first q on this forum.

We are looking to implement VC in our environment and I have a quick (yet important) preliminary question.

Is it possible to etherchannel from ONE blade chassis (i.e. a couple of VC networking modules) to TWO serparate Cisco 6509's?

Would the configuration be Active/Active or A/Passive? What would the convergence time be? Comparable to simple Cisco etherchannelling with normal Cisco switches?

Have included explanatory Visio diagram.

Your help would be much appreciated.

Kev.

3 REPLIES 3
Lmm_1
Honored Contributor

Re: Etherchannelling betw. VC Chassis and TWO Cisco Switches

Kevin,
Check the following file, it will solve your doubt.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01386629/c01386629.pdf


rgds
lmm
Kevin Rounce
New Member

Re: Etherchannelling betw. VC Chassis and TWO Cisco Switches

Many thanks lmm, have seen this docco before and I find it a bit ambiguous - it says that you can etherchannel between VC and one Cisco, but not from one chassis to two Cisco switches... Subsequently spoke to a VC guru in HP and he says the following: it basically achieves what I was setting out to do...

"In the discussion we had yesterday, we spoke of doing the VLAN tagging on the ESX servers in the vSwitch configuration. In that case you must NOT use Shared Uplink Sets in Virtual Connect, you must use simple VC networks that will carry tagged frames transparently. Otherwise, you can use Shared Uplink Sets in VC but then you must NOT do any VLAN tagging in ESX and instead use different physical NICs to connect to your different VLANs and Virtual Connect will take care of the tagging. The scenario 7 I mentioned in the cookbook uses the former case: tagging by the vSwitch, tagged frames tunneled through VC. Note that you can still use separate physical NICs for your different kinds of traffic (Service Console, VMkernel, VM network), you├в ll just connect all your physical NICs to the same VC network. This is the more common configuration with ESX. To answer your questions directly, yes you can have 2 different VC networks carrying the same VLAN IDs. You take the pNIC physically connected to VC module 1 and you connect it logically in VC Manager to the VC network with the uplink on module 1, same for the second pNIC and VC module 2, and you assign both pNICs to your vSwitch, either Active/Standby or both Active. And yes, that├в s exactly the point of the SmartLink feature: if the uplink to Cisco switch one fails, VC will disconnect the links for all the server NICs connected to the VC network containing this uplink in ~4 seconds and ESX will trigger the failover."

Dan Robinson_4
Regular Advisor

Re: Etherchannelling betw. VC Chassis and TWO Cisco Switches

I dont know alot about VC and Cisco, but it has always been my experience that for Active/Active you need to be on the SAME Cisco Switch but for Active/Passive you can be on separate Cisco switches for added redundancy.