HP Blade Enclosure Clustering

[Josh C]

Hi All
I am planning on migrating some DL380 file and print servers onto blades. The strategy is to put each blade (BL460c) into it's own enclosure. They actually sit on top of each other. My question is how do I physically get the clustering working? As in the heartneat stuff. Do I need to run any physical cable b/w the enclosure to achieve this. Any help appreciated. Thx.

[JKytsi]

You can't mean that one blade in one enclosure ?

You put 16 BL460 blades to one c7000 enclosure or 8 in c3000.

Maybe You should start planning from here
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/blades/components/c-class-tech-function.html

[Josh C]

No. I understand the concept of the blades. We have other servers housed. ie the other 14, within the enclosures. They are both c7000. The question is more directed at how to get the heartbeat working. Do I need to run a cable to directly connect the 2 enclosures to achieve this heartbeat or private network? If so where do I run the cable...

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hello,

what kind of clustering do you want? Microsoft Cluster or ServiceGuard or anything else? Cluster heartbeat can be trasmitted by network or serial cable, sometimes over the SAN. In your case network heartbeat would be the best method. Configure your interconnects so that the blades can reach each other by network.

Best regards,
Patrick

[HEM_2]

the answer to this question really depends on the type of ethernet interconnects you plan to use.

[Adrian Clint]

Josh, for what you are asking blades are not really much different to normal servers - its just that the cable you would normally have between a NIC and a patch panel or switch is a circuit board track in the blade backplane. There is no special linking between enclosures or between blades that is not covered by using a switch.

So to answer your question. Yes you will need to link a switch in each enclosure with a switch in the other enclosure. Which switches depends on your NIC you use for the heartbeat. If you have NIC3 on each blade for your heartbeat then you need a cable between network switch 3 on each enclosure.

The other cheaper way to do this would be to fit pass-thru's instead of switches for the heartbeats and link the appropriate ports on the pass-thru's with twisted cables. That would give you a totally private physical link between the two cluster nodes.