Connect a P2000i G3 to a C7000 with Flex-10's

[dbx13]

Hi everyone, I've practised due diligence in my search for an answer but need your advice now.

I have a C7000 with 5 x BL460 blades running Server 2008 R2, serving as HyperV hosts. The internal SB600c proved insufficient for hosting the HyperV VM's so I have turned to SAN storage. The only interconnects installed in the C7000 are two Flex-10's.

I have a P2000i G3 SAN with two four-port 1GBe controllers. How do I make the SAN storage available to all blades in the C7000? That is, how is it easiest to connect the P2000 to the C7000? Do I need additional interconnects or can I use the Flex-10's?

Thanks!

Dan

[Johan Guldmyr]

Double-post. One should've been enough.

Same as http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/HP-BladeSystem/P2000i-G3-SAN-storage-for-a-C7000-how-to-connect/m-p/5281099#M17388

Anyway,

Hi!

Is it this flex-10 you have?
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13127_div/13127_div.html

The ports for external are these:
8 x 10Gb SR, LR, or LRM fiber and copper SFP+ uplinks

-- Then

Quickspecs for the P2000 G3:

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13551_div/13551_div.html

- Do you have the 1GbE iSCSI or the 10GbE iSCSI P2000 G3?

The 10GbE uses SFP+ so maybe for that it would work to just directly connect them?

I suppose that for the 1GbE (just normal Ethernet?) you would need something in between, like another switch that has ports for both SFP+ and the 1GbE.

[dbx13]

Hello Johan, mind my double post, I was unsure how to link the question to both the Storage forum and the Blade forum.

Yes, that is the Flex-10 we have, part number 455880-B21.

And, we use the 1GBe iSCSI P2000 but may consider upgrading the controllers to 10GBe.

I'm not sure it is possible to connect them directly, but then, we will also need discrete (stand-alone) Proliants to have access to the P2000 SAN.

Thank you for your conversation,

Dan

[Johan Guldmyr]

If you expand to servers outside the c-class it might be worth thinking about another network layer on top of the c7000. Depends on the scale of course.

Hopefully somebody who has tested this can respond.

[Mark Wibaux]

You will not be able to connect the P2000i directly to the Flex-10 module. The Flex-10 interconnects will need to connect to some normal network switches which would then connect to your P2000i. If you already have the P2000i attaching to other servers I would assume that you already have this infrastructure in place.

As to how you present your iSCSI to you servers well that really depends on how you've already configured up the FlexNICs in the existing setup. My preference would be to dedicate a pair of FlexNICs (1 from each LOM port) to your iSCSI traffic with a minimum bandwidth of 1Gb (I'm assuming you are presenting LUNs to the underlying Hyper-V rather than directly to your guest VMs).
If you have the option I would also create a separate network in the Virtual Connect environment that used seperate uplinks to those that you are using for normal network traffic. This way your iSCSI traffic is isolated as much as possible.

[Bob_Vance]

So you have the 1Gbe P2000 w 4-port controllers.
And Flex-10 Virtual Connect.

You *could* simply connect up the P2000 to the uplink backbone switch and have the iSCSI traffic on the same public network as the application/client network.
And be up and running immediately.

One advantage here is that you wouldn't have to worry about how much bandwidth to carve out/dedicate to the iSCSI as opposed to the application network.
Another possible advantage here is that other systems besides the blades could access the Array.

Best practice, of course, would be to have a separate network (physical or VLAN) for the iSCSI.

For that, you have a few options:

1) I'm not that familiar with Hyper-V, but it supports VLANs.
You may be able to put the P2000 in a separate VLAN and put 2 vNICs on the VMs.
Here, the P2000 would connect to a backbone switch that supports VLANS.
Again, you would not need to carve out fNICS and worry about how much bandwidth to assign.

2) As Mark said, create two flexNICs per physical Flex10 NIC and use 2 fNICs for iSCSI and 2 fNICs for public network.

3) for separate physical, add a couple of cheap Procurves switches (NOT interconnects) dedicated for the P2000 (and future iSCSI arrays) and use some uplinks from the VC to these switches


see doco:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c02533991/c02533991.pdf


bv

[dbx13]

Thanks for the input guys!

Hi Mark, I do have the P2000 running right now but am nto using an intermediate switch yet as I only have a couple discrete Proliants that need access to SAN storage, so I'm going straight from server to one of the eight available 1GB ports on the P2000. iSCSI traffic is isolated to a dedicated VLAN. Looking forward then to the C7000, I do plan on using a pair of flex nics for iSCSI traffic to the blades. The goal will be to have access to the SAN from both the C7000 blades and the stand-alone Proliants.

Hi Bob, I'm coming around to see how this all comes together, using a separate set of physical switches and dedicated VLAN's instead of going straight from P2000 to C7000 as I had originally imagined.

The doc link you offered was useful, thank you. So now the P2000 has two controllers, each with four 1GB ports. Four go to one dedicated Procurve SAN switch, four to another. How do the switches see each set of four connections? As trunked? And then when one takes a couple connections out to each of the Flex-10's, or even to a discrete Proliant, do they see each set of four P2000 ports as one IP?

Dan

[dbx13]

I understand a switch will be required. Thanks to all.