flex-10 and 28 vlans on esx enviroment

[Toni Maatta]

Hi, Just figured out that single flexnic can only handle 28 vlans. Sounds like a joke and now I'm wondering how one should design ESX-platform to support more than 28 vlans? I guess this approach just doesn't work... And what I heard, HP won't increase this at least in next 9 months...

[brian plume]

What I would recommend in this scenario is to change your settings to "VLAN Tunneling", instead of the default "Mapped VLANs". This will allow all traffic to pass directly through the virtual connect module, and at the ESX level, you'll be able to sift out the VLANs you want at the vSwitch/network level. That way you don't have any limitation with regards to the number of VLANs. And actually, I thought it was 32 VLANs, not 28, but I guess another 4 doesn't make much of a difference. Hope that helps you out. Brian

[Toni Maatta]

Yep, but then I lose the whole point here.. only 2 x 10G cables doing "everything" Also, if I change to tunneling mode, can I just add more uplinks and map those to vlans on virtualconnect? All of blades won't be esx-servers and it would be nice to use normal access port on those.

[mattsn]

Hello, A follow up question...: Does the 28 (32?) VLAN limit apply to all VC modules or only the Flex-10? TIA! // Matts

[Adrian Clint]

Well its in the VC 1/10 Eth modules as well, so I assume its a VC limit. I have in my VC Design doc... Max 28 VLANs per Mapped NIC (First 28 of the Shared Uplink Set presented to it) Max 64 VLANs on a Shared Uplink Set