Switch Connection Concept in a Blade Enclosure Environment

[Janezic Milan]

Hi,

We've received a new Blade Enclosure and I'm trying now to configure the Switches correctly.

I've read some Cisco/ HP Guidelines, but somehow I'm a little bit lost in the concept with the Switches/Enclosures.

I hope someone could give me some good hints to configure it the right way ( no bandwidth bottlenecks / redundant).

Our Environment:

We've got two Networks:

• 1x Internal (192.168.90.0/24)
• 2x External (10.90.1.0/24)

The configured Vlans are:

• VLAN 200 -> Internal
• VLAN 2500 -> External

The Blade Servers are/should be configured with 2-IP Adresses (no NIC Teaming):

• 192.168.90.xx
• 10.90.1.xx

Every Blade Enclosure (c7000) has 2x BladeSwitches (Cisco Catalyst Blade Swich 3020):

• BladeSwitch-11
• BladeSwitch-12
• BladeSwitch-16
• BladeSwitch-17

We've got another 2x Switches:

• Switch-15 (Cisco SGE2010), where the Blade Switches should be connected togheter
• External Switch where we don't have any permission and the VLAN is set to 2500

Please have a look at the attached png!

Our requirements:

• Our Blade Servers should be connected to both Networks (10.90.1.0/24, 192.168.90.0/24)
• No bandwidth bottlenecks!
• redundant configuration with the existing hardware (best possible way)

My thoughts:

Bandwidth / Redundancy:

For each BladeSwitch to make Etherchannels with two Ports bundled to a logical one. -> The Problem here could be that I don't have permission on a switch (No Permission Switch), so I would just make it for the Internal Network (Switch-15 and the BladeSwitches)

Redundancy:

Link State Tracking: So far as I've read Link state Tracking wouldn't bring nothing, because it's just a failover configuration when used with Server NIC Adapter Teaming (which I don't have)

Is there any other way to make it more redundant?