HP’s Virtual Connect Ethernet Cookbook:Single and Multi Enclosure Domain (Stacked) Scenarios is a good start to see what is possible with Flex-10 networking.Īlthough it is a comprehensive document at 229 pages, I don’t think it does a good job of helping you decide which scenario you should deploy. You can get more chassis stacking information from HP’s Virtual Connect Multi-Enclosure Stacking Reference Guide. If your stacking is all correct within Virtual Connect Manager you will see the following: For a 3 x chassis deployment you will need 3 x CX-4 stack cables. Orange lines are internal stacking links and red lines are external cables. This is what your stacking cabling will look like. Connect 10Gb CX-4 HP Stacking cables to the X1 connector to link the chassis together. You then need to create a ring to connect all switches together and provide 2 directions for traffic to pass. What you want to do is link all these Flex-10 switches together with HP stack cables so they form a single logical network and traffic from blades in one chassis can travel to switches or blades in another chassis without having to go to an upstream switch.Īdjacent switches in a chassis are linked together via the chassis backplain. You will then hopefully have purchased 2 x Flex-10 switches for each chassis and inserted them in Bay 1 and 2. That takes care of the cabling for chassis administration. You will then cascade the OA modules together using ethernet network cables so you can manage all your chassis by connected to any one of them. You will have 1Gb Onboard Administrator network cables from each OA module to an upstream switch providing chassis management and iLO for your blades. If you have A at the top with 2 chassis, when you add Chassis C the order will be confusing. It may be a good idea to name your chassis from the bottom of the rack up starting with Chassis A because if you are starting with 2 x chassis you will have Chassis A and Chassis B and later can add another Chassis C to fill up your rack. You can join 4 chassis together but its more common to join 3 together as it fits better in your rack. HP c7000 Chassis’ with Flex10 switches are meant to be joined together.
Let’s start with how to get your chassis talking to each other. One of the goals of this blog is simplifying IT so it’s time to apply this to Flex-10.
They seem to want you to cram us much of Flex-10 into your deployment as possible when you should rather be streamlining the design to rather give you only what you need. I do however think that HP is trying a little too hard to sell all the benefits of Flex-10 and is possibly sacrificing simplicity to show off all the features of Flex-10. Don’t you love trying to find things on HP’s site?
I also recently managed to find the manual page for the HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 10Gb Ethernet Module for c-Class BladeSystem on HP’s site which is a good reference launch page for the latest HP Virtual Connect Ethernet Cookbook and all other Flex-10 related documentation. If you are deploying Flex-10 make sure you have all the prerequisites in place: I’ve also discussed my ideas about Flex-10 ESX design on the podcast so here it is… I’ve written quite a few posts about HP Flex-10 and some of the challenges and solutions to getting everything up and running.