Virtual Connect (VC) - suggestion needed

[chuckk281]

Leo had a VC configuration question:

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Hello Experts,

We have 2 enclosure domain with the following configuration,

Enclosure 1 & 2

Bay1 & 2 – VC FlexFabric interconnect module with 2 uplinks per module.

VC configuration.

For enclosure1,  1 vnet configured as below (same followed for other enclosure as well),

Uplink ports from interconnect bay 1 & 2 are combined to form one vnet, as shown in below screenshot,

From network switch point (nearly 15 VLAN’s are allowed in each port) of view these ports are trunked and tagging is enabled.

From server OS end or from VC domain side I can’t see any where VLAN ID was provided, not sure what setting to be followed to form this connection type.

Your expert suggestion would be much help for me.

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Input from Dave:

It appears you created a simple network setup.

You would want to use/create a SUS(Shared Uplink Set) to tell VC to look for those 15 VLANs.

The VLAN entry will be at the bottom of the SUS screen.

This will pass VLANs through to the servers, but they will need to untag the VLAN that is needed and you would not be able to utilize the P-NIC as efficiently.

P.S. It appears to be a four enclosure stack with enclosures BRBH1011 –BRBH1014?

Reply from Leo:

Customer doesn’t want to have SUS, because the management or profile creation they expect to be very simple. So that have practice of creating one vnet to be assigned to all the server nics, they want to same to be followed for the new enclosure which we are going to manage.

Input from John:

I just noticed that the network you created has “enable vlan tunneling” checked so you can pass multiple vlans. By creating a vlan tunnel you are passing all tagged vlans straight down to any network adapter in the profile assigned to this vnet. You will have to do the vlan definitions at the OS level as no vlans will be defined at the VC level because it doesn’t care it’s a tunnel. If the OS is Vmware the vswitch you create with these adapters will have multiple port groups created and each port group will have a vlan defined for it.

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Other thoughts or suggestions?

[marcelkoedijk]

iam agree with John.

Please note that the use of one vnet means that you can provide a profile with 2x flexlom 10Gb.

Each vNet can only one time attached to a LOM.

you can't make more than 2 flexnics of 10GB in this case.

Lom1a connected to BRBH1014 10Gb

Lom2a connected to BRBH1014 10Gb

lom1b,1c,1d,2b,2c,2d cant connect to the same vNet a second time.

Because VLAN Tunneling is enabled, VC passed the VLAN tags to the server edge. The VLAN's must configured on the server edge in the vswitch configuration of vmware.

My choice in this case should the use of shared uplinks with VLANs defined in VC. Reason is that you can make it possible to create 8 flexnics, and isolate the bandwidth to each applications need within that VLAN, thats a good best pratice for hypervisor enviroments.