Flex-10 lessons learned
Hi I have moved this blog to the new site frankdenneman.nl.
The new home for this article is: http://frankdenneman.nl/2009/04/flex-10-lessons-learned/
Apologies for the inconvenience
Categories: VMware
Blade, c7000, ESX, Flex-10, Flexnic, HP Blade, I/O, Interconnect bay, ISCSI, Loop prevent mechanism, mezzanine, port mapping, Server Profile, Shared Uplink Set, Storage, uplink, Virtual Connect, Virtual Connect module, VLAN, vswitch
You can get active/active uplinks from Virtual Connects by using multiple Shared Uplink Sets. If you haven’t seen them already, I highly recommend joining the HP Virtual Connect Interest Group, as well as reading the Virtual Connect Cookbok.
https://h30340.leveragesoftware.com/group_view.aspx?GroupID=17729857a4624f21b9496cda5ac049f6
Thx I’m aware of using multiple SUS’s to create active active uplinks. Due to the configuration of the physical switches, multiple SUS for the use of one VLAN is not accepted by the network team.
It seems that the link sections did not appear in the orginal post. I’ve added the links, including the cookbook.
I’m not really sure , I have no experience yet , but I have read through the cookbook and as I understand if you use the “smartlink” feature in VC it will disconnect the flexnics when the vc uplink goes down. If it already is in a “blocked” state , wont the flexnics already be disconnected then ?
Or if it is not disconnected I am thinking of the “Beacon Probe” setting in the vSwitch ? If you enable the “Beacon Probe” setting in the vSwitch it sounds to me that it will correctly understand which flexnic to use…? Anyone with experience on this ?
Well you can have active/passive without any trouble as long the 2 virtual connect are put on the same line on C3000 or C7000. In fact each virtual connect on the same line are linked together by the C7000 or C3000 internal switch.
This means that if the packet is sent to the passive one, it will just go through the internal switch of the C7000/C3000 to the active virtual connect (the one that has the active uplink).
So esx can either loabalance on all the physical interfaces configured for the vmkernel or virtual switch, all packets will go finaly to the active uplink without any trouble.
When your vitual connect switches are not on the same line, then you have dedicated 10 Gb links from HP that can be purchased to chain them and have the same result.
We have the FC Flex10 VCs, but cannot get them to work at all. They are connected to 1GB ports on a Cisco 3560E switch. No link light. We cannot find any documentation on the Flex10 and HP support hardly knows anything about them.