Fibre Channel Switch c7000
Fibre Channel Switch c7000
Fibre Channel Switch c7000
http://vinf.net/2008/04/09/how-does-an-hp-fibre-channel-virtual-connect...
Techhead and I have spent a lot of time recently scratching our heads over how and where fibre channel SAN connections go in a c7000 blade chassis. If you dont know, a FC-VC module looks like this, and you install them in redundant pairs in adjacent interconnect bays at the rear of the chassis.
You then patch each of the FC Ports into a FC switch. The supported configuration is one FC-VC Module to 1 FC switch (below)
So, in essence you treat each VC module as terminating all HBA Port 1s and the other FC-VC module as terminating all HBA Port 2s.
1 of 7
10/13/2011 11:33 AM
http://vinf.net/2008/04/09/how-does-an-hp-fibre-channel-virtual-connect...
The setup we had: A number of BL460c blades with dual-port Qlogic Mezzanine card HBAs. HP c7000 Blade chassis with 2 x FC-VC modules plugged into interconnect bay 3 & 4 (shown below)
The important point to note is that whilst you have 4 uplinks on each FC-VC module that does not mean you have 2 x 16Gb/s connection pool or trunk that you just connect into. Put differently if you unplug one, the overall bandwidth does not drop to 12Gb/s etc. it will disconnect a single HBA port on a number of servers and force them to failover to the other path and FC-VC module. It does not do any dynamic load balancing or anything like that it is literally a physical port concentrator which is why it needs NPIV to pass through the WWNs from the physical blade HBAs. There is a concept of over-subscription, in the Virtual Connect GUI thats managed by setting the number of uplink ports used. Most people will probably choose 4 uplink ports per VC module, this is 4:1 oversubscription, meaning each FC-VC port (and there are 4 per module) has 4 individual HBA ports connected to it, if you reduce the numeber of uplinks you increase the oversubscription (2 uplinks = 8:1 oversubscription, 1 uplink = 16:1 oversubscription)
Which FC-VC Port does my blades HBA map to? The front bay you insert your blade into determines which individual 4Gb/s port it maps to and shares with other blades) on the FC-VC module, its not just a virtual pool of connections, this is important when you plan your deployment as it can affect the way failover works. the following table is what we found from experimentation and a quick glance at the HP Virtual Connect Cookbook (more on this later)
FC-VC Port
Maps to HBA in Blade Chassis Bay, and these ports are also shared by..
2 of 7
10/13/2011 11:33 AM
http://vinf.net/2008/04/09/how-does-an-hp-fibre-channel-virtual-connect...
Each individual blade has a dual port HBA, so for example the HBA within the blade in bay 12 maps out as follows
Looking at it from a point of a single SAN attached Blade the following diagram is how it all should hook together
Path Failover Unplugging an FC cable from bay 3, port 4 will disconnect one of the HBA connections to all of the blades in bays 4,8,10 and 14 and force the blades host OS to handle a failover to its secondary path via the FC-VC module in bay 4.
3 of 7
10/13/2011 11:33 AM