Comments on: Using VMware ESX Virtual Switch Tagging with HP Virtual Connect

By: Jon

Jon — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:48:00 +0000

Hello Chuck, and Diego. We are having the same problem have you been able to resolve the issue. We have been working with HP, Cisco, and VmWare and no one seems to be able to find out what is happening.

By: Vote Early (But Don’t Vote Often) - blog.scottlowe.org - The weblog of an IT pro specializing in virtualization, storage, and servers

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 03:35:45 +0000

[...] VMware ESX Networking via CLI Introduction to Nehalem Memory (by guest author Aaron Delp) Using VMware ESX Virtual Switch Tagging with HP Virtual Connect Another Reason Not to Use PVSCSI or [...]

By: Diego

Diego — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 05:45:25 +0000

Hello Chuck Hooper, how you resolve the issue with ARP?, i have the same problem.
Regards

By: Chuck Hooper

Chuck Hooper — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:29:08 +0000

We’re setting things up similar to Greg, however I’ve run into an ODD issue where the ARP requests from a Guest VM to the Cisco Gateway is never getting back to the VM. I can use ICMP pings of other servers on the same VLAN (across switches mind you) and it works fine. Have a case open with Vmware on it, but haven’t heard back

By: Greg Palmer

Greg Palmer — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 02:05:20 +0000

We have set up our flex 10’s with an LACP port channel to each flex 10 module. The shared uplink sets are named like sus_VDC-Set1-A and
sus_VDC-Set1-A-B. Suppose these carry vlan ids 100,200, 300 and 400.
I define networks on each of the uplink sets as nw_100-A and nw_100-B for the respective uplink sets. Then when setting up NICs you choose an uplink set for the NIC and only select networks defined on that uplink set. This prevents loops as the left NIC’s go out sus A and the right NIC’s go out sus B. Then we make a failover ot TeLB bond for the NIC’s. Done! Dual redundant LACP paths back to different switches with the host responsible for failover.

One other thing to think about is that if you alternate the sever profiles so that say everyblade in an odd slot uses sus A for the left NIC and every even slot uses sus B for the left NIC then you can get the incoming traffic to the blades coming in both sus’s rather than just the left without mucking around too much with preferences in the teaming config. Setting the first NIC always as the preferred master will then cause things to failover and fail back at the host level.

By: steve

steve — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 03:36:34 +0000

We are knee deep in a design/setup. A couple things I am struggling with are the Server profiles. I don’t understand why you have to name each server a different profile name. Somewhat anoying.

The other issue is we have 2 enclosures with 2 flex in each chassis, daisy chaining the modules between enclosures. Strange is if the 2 master modules are taken out or offlined (in chassis 1), you are orphaned from the other modules (chassis 2). What anoying is you would THINK you could get to the surviving modules to manage, but NO. yes, you still have connectivity through the surviving modules.

I am not sure if this is by design, or we are doing something wrong. We are new to the modules, so any help is appreciated.

oh, We have also gone with the BL460 G6’s with 48GB of ram. Seems to be the best bang for our buck, and will plan on putting the 8GB modules in when they come down. We run mostly windows boxes, so we run out of memory before procs etc. Also running Netapp 6040’s with PAM and dedupe. We are seeing 38 to 60 % savings on the space…

PEACE

By: Thinking Out Loud: HP Flex-10 Design Considerations - blog.scottlowe.org - The weblog of an IT pro specializing in virtualization, storage, and servers

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:41:25 +0000

[...] Using VMware ESX Virtual Switch Tagging with HP Virtual Connect Using Multiple VLANs with HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 Follow-Up About Multiple VLANs, Virtual Connect, and Flex-10 [...]

By: julianwood

julianwood — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:47:28 +0000

Scott, how are you / others recommending you configure networking for Flex-10.
We are wanting to use a single 10GbE uplink from each Flex-10 module and I think I like the idea of keeping the network uplinks from module 1 and 2 separate and get the ESX hosts to handle the failover.
We are using NetApp and NFS for storage.
Would you use the Flex-10 capability of presenting multiple Nics to the hosts or just run everything over the two Nics, maybe making LAN/SC Primary on Nic1 and NAS/VMotion primary on Nic2 but using port groups so they could fail over to each other.
Should I use multiple VLANs to logically separate LAN/NAS/VMotion or again run everything over the same links.
Would you use shared uplinks or normal uplinks?
If you did have to carve out the Nics, what would you set and how would you lay it out.

Would be great to see what people are doing for a reference design for ESX 4 on HP Blades.

Another problem we have come up with us which blade to use. Initially we liked the BL460C as it had hot swappable drives but in order to get a reasonable amount of memory you had to use 8Gb modules which brought up the cost significantly. We then veered towards the BL490c as it has more memory slots so you could use 4Gb modules which are cheaper. Even though you can use Solid state disks you cannot mirror them which creates a single point of failure so you may as well use the SD Card and ESXi but that is again a single point of failure and we’re not sure we’re comfortable with running ESX off one drive (opinions welcome).
So we’re back to the 460C with HSS drives and using only 48Gb Memory and having multiple blades as it’s cheaper running 2 x 460c with 4Gb Dimms than a single fully populated with 8Gb Dimms.

So any opinions welcome.

Would love to hear how you are laying out your Flex-10, what you present to the hosts and whether you pass the VLANs directly to the host or create a virtual switch and how you split out traffic.

By: gnijs

gnijs — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 21:06:01 +0000

Very interesting document. Just the info i needed. As a Cisco guy, i was hesitating to put a vc domain in tunneling mode. I just want mapping mode AND the ability to make a trunk or standard access port. “Multiple VLANs” gives me just that. And from what i read here, i can even assign “Multiple VLANs” to a FlexNIC, and not the physical NIC. Nice. Regarding Smartlink, if you use the interconnect link and active/standby uplink sets, you don’t need smartlink feature….
I do have another question: if i have an uplink set containing interfaces across two VC modules, the ones on VC1 will be active, the ones on VC two will be standby. In HP, they are both assigned the same LAG ID. However, in my cisco uplink switch, uplinks on vc1 are on portchannel, my uplinks on vc2 are a different portchannel, so on cisco side, my lacp_ids are different. could this pose a problem ?

By: Stuart Thompson

Stuart Thompson — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:32:35 +0000

Scott,

I’m trying to write a design for a vSphere implementation using BL685c G6 servers which have 4 Flex-NICS onboard, so I’ll see 16 NICS.

What I don’t know, because I don’t have the kit yet, is how these are mapped out.

If my blade enclosure contains 2 virtual-connect flex-10 modules, I’d like to have vmnics paired and going through seperate paths for redundancy.

I’m not planning to use all 16 NICS, only 8. Which also complicates the situation as I’m unable to say which 8 these will be and how to divide them up between my vSwitches.

Do you have any info on which LOM will hold which vmnics?