HP Virtual Connect 4Gb Fibre Channel Module for c-Class BladeSystem 409513-B22 Dépliant

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Executive Summary 

HP is revolutionizing the way IT thinks about networking and server management. When combined 

with Virtual Connect, the BladeSystem architecture streamlines the typical change processes for 

provisioning in the datacenter.  
The HP ProLiant BladeSystem Generation 6 servers with Virtual Connect Flex-10 flexible networking 
adapters are a beneficial platform for VMware vSphere infrastructure. These servers include 

virtualization friendly features such as large memory capacity, dense population, room for additional 

mezzanine cards and 8 - 24 (with Intel Hyper-Threading technology enabled) processing cores. The 

following ProLiant BL Servers ship standard with a pair of Virtual Connect Flex-10 network adapters 
(NC532i): 

 

BL495 G5/G6 

 

BL460 G6 

 

BL490 G6 

 

BL685 G6 

Virtual Connect Flex-10 is the world's first technology to divide and fine-tune 10Gb Ethernet network 

bandwidth at the server edge. It carves the capacity of a 10Gb Ethernet connection into four discrete 

NIC ports, called FlexNICs, and adds the unique ability to fine-tune each connection to adapt to your 
virtual server channels and workloads on-the-fly. The effect of using Flex-10 is a dramatic reduction in 

the number of interconnect modules required to uplink outside of the enclosure, while still maintaining 

full redundancy across the service console, VMkernel and virtual machine (VM) networks. This 

translates to a lower cost infrastructure with fewer management points and cables that can still 

achieve a per server increase in bandwidth.  
When designing a vSphere Network infrastructure with Virtual Connect Flex-10, there are two 

frequent network architectures customers choose.  This document describes how to design highly 

available Virtual Connect Flex-10 strategy with: 
 

Virtual Connect Managed VLANs - In this design, we are maximizing the management features of 
Virtual Connect, while providing customers with the flexibility to provide “any networking to any 

host” within the Virtual Connect domain.  Simply put, this design will not over-provision servers, 

while keeping the number of uplinks used to a minimum.  This helps reduce infrastructure cost and 

complexity by trunking the necessary VLANs (IP Subnets) to the Virtual Connect domain, and 
minimizing potentially expensive 10Gb uplink ports. 

 

Virtual Connect Pass-through VLANs - This design addresses customer requirements to support a 

significant number of VLANs for Virtual Machine traffic.  The previous design has a limited 

number of VLANs it can support.  While providing similar server profile network connection 
assignments as the previous design, more uplink ports are required, and VLAN Tunneling must be 

enabled within the Virtual Connect domain. 

Both designs provide highly available network architecture, and also take into account enclosure level 

redundancy and vSphere cluster design.  By spreading the cluster scheme across both enclosures, 
each can provide local HA in case of network and enclosure failure. 
Finally, this document will provide a key design best practice for vSphere 4 network architecture with 

Virtual Connect Flex-10, including: 

 

Local vSwitch design for VMkernel functions 

 

vDS design for Virtual Machine networking 

 

vSwitch and dvPortGroup load balance algorithms