Vitual Connect vs. NO Virtual Connect

[Hai Scai]

Hi,

I've been reading pros and cons about Virtual Connect and I thought that would be good to have them all in one thread.

So could you please share your thoughts on this?

Thank everybody in anticipation.

[Emil Velez]

Virtual Connect vs Cisco and Brocade modules

The major reason for using Cisco or Brocade interconnect modules is to adhear with your network and san people. In that case your network only wants to use Cisco gear and/or your SAN group only will accept Brocade gear for SAN switching.

if your network and san group will not allow you to configure any switch for the enclosure then your only choice will be pass through modules but by using pass through modules you must then have anetwork and san cable for each nic snd FC port.

Virtual connect provides a very detailed network and fibrechannel switching features to reduce your cables but in addition the major eason for using Virtual connect also is that it allows you to assign MAC addresses to lan cards, serial numbers to blades and WWIDs to Fibrechannel ports in a profile that you assign to a device bay.

Lets say you have to replace a blade. The MAC addresses and serial number will change. This means that you need to coordinate with your LAN team to reconfigure the vlans to accept the new blade and possibly have to get a new software license key if a software product is keyed for the blade serial number.

WIth virtual connect you replace the blade, coordinate the boot issues and when the blade boots it inerits the mac addresses and serial number of the "PROFILE".

With the Fibrechanel virtual connect module you assign SAN WWIDs to Fibrechannel ports in the profile and if you have to replace a fibrechannel card in blade the new fibrechannel card is assigned the WWIDs by the profile and no SAN zoning or target mappng need to be redone.

Bottom line: virtual connect makes replacing Blades and fibrechannel cards easy. Heck if you boot from san if a blade fails you can just move the profile to a spare blade, let it boot and you are up and running with no need to replace hardware.

at the www.hp.com/go/blades there are many whitepapers on Virtual connect including myths and Virtual Connect for "Dummies" and Virtual Connect for Cisco.

You can also look on youtube.com for some virtual connect tech talks that I found were uploaded.

[Emil Velez]

In addition if you have flex10 Nics in your blades or mezazine cards the passthrough and Cisco switch modules will only recognize 1 of the NICs and will not allow you to configure the FlexNics

So you need the flex10 Virtual connect module or the FlexFabric Virtual Connect module to take advantage of Flex10 Nics on Blades or Mezazine cards.

FlexFabric in case you weree interested is a new Lan/SAN connector on a few new blades but is backward compatible with FC ports and Ethernet ports on blades.