Connecting a 10GB Switch to a P4500 and Flex-10's

[dbx13]

Good day people,

We are planning a SAN upgrade, and have a C7000 in place with two Flex-10's. We'd like to use an HP 10GBe iSCSI P4500 for the C7000's blades to store HyperV VM's, and we'd also like to offer the SAN storage to discrete Proliants.

What is the best switch config in this case? We will be using dedicated switch gear, and two dedicated VLAN's for iSCSI traffic.

1. An 8-port 10GB switch (logically divided in half to handle each iSCSI VLAN), with two connections to the SAN, two to the Flex-10's (one 10GB to each Flex-10), and then two more to a couple 1GB switches which the discrete Proliants could use to access the SAN storage. In the case of the 1GB switches, likely a pair of Cisco 3750's which do offer two optional 10GB ports plus 48 x 1GB ports.

2. Or, just two 3750's each with two 10GB modules installed, and from each switch, one 10GB conenction to the SAN and one to a Flex-10. Then, in this case, if another P4500 expansion were added later, we would have no more 10GB connections on the switch to connect that new P4500.

3. A 24-port 10GB switch, logically divided in half, allowing for P4500 SAN expansion, but discrete Proliants using 1GB NICs would not utilize the 10GB switch ports fully.

Other suggestions?

Thanks!

Dan

P.S. This thread has been moved from Storage Area Networks (SAN) (Enterprise) to HP StoreVirtual Storage / LeftHand. - Hp Forum Moderator

[Mark Wibaux]

My personal preference would be to use 2 switches. This gives you redundancy should you loose a switch or need to do any maintenance (you can just bring down one at a time and keep your SAN up and running).

[dbx13]

Hi Mark, if we go with two Cisco 3750 swtiches, each switch only only offers two 10GB optional connections, the rest are 1GB. So if we add another P4500 do we need to buy more 3750's?

Thanks,

Dan

[Mark Wibaux]

Sorry haven't responded soooner but i've been away for few days.

I don't know the Cisco product range all that well (I'm more of a HP person). BUT based on past experience with other customers they have used a couple of the Cisco Nexus 5000 series as 10Gb concentrators.
One option if these are too expensive now is to continue with the 3750s. If you do plan on buying more P4000 nodes down the track allow for the cost of the Nexus switches then. What you would do then is move all the 10Gb connections over to the Nexus's and the link the 3750's up to them to continue to provide your servers 1Gb connections.

[dbx13]

Very good, that's the idea then. Go with 1GB connectivity for now and when that saturates move to the 10GB link.

Thanks guys!

Dan