HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 10Gb Ethernet Module

[Tyrone Van Der Haar]

What is Cisco's answer to the follwing product from HP HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 10Gb Ethernet Module

Our server team are about to implement this because they want more nics/vm and it's cheaper than buying cisco blade switches.

Any other problems you guys can see with implementing this?

/T

[Reza Sharifi]

Tyrone,

HP is not the only one using this.  You can for example get IBM chassis and install this blade with multiple 10Gigs.

Theses 10Gig blade are used to raise the backplane from 1Gig to 10Gig and I think you still have 4 10Gigs for your uplinks.

Since we use 6500 in our data center distributions and for ease of interpretability, we use the Cisco 3110x 10Gig switches (4 per chassis) with IBM chassis.

HTH

Reza

[Tyrone Van Der Haar]

Okay, the Flex-10 doesn't support QOS there of breaking the QOS chain.

The server team want's to be able to add more NIC's to their virtual servers

/tyrone

[gnijs]

Tyrone,

I guess the only good answer is: the cisco answer to this is UCS

Otherwise, start reading up on HP Virtual Connect ...quickly....

There are some major differences between 2 HP VC modules vs. 2 Cisco switches.

1) In HP VC, the two switches in slot 1 & 2 are by default and obligatory connected with each other (using the internal chassis backplane). Using C3120 switches, you can choose to use this interconnect or not (in fact, in our deployment we don't use this inter-connection, to really seperate the two switching fabrics). Furthermore, HP doesn't have something as VBS or true stacking, so these two HP VC switches still remain two seperate switches. This means you can't create a portchannel across slot 1 & 2.

2) Future versions of HP Virtual Connect will even support "dynamic speed" Flex-10 interfaces. this means the interface can change speed depending on time ie. during the night the "backup" interface can change to 8 Gbps, during the day the "production" interface can change to 8 Gbps. All very nice, but how on earth are you going to manage/troubleshoot this ???

3) There is a nice guide: HPVC for Cisco Administrators at http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01386629/c01386629.pdf

4) As you mention, the HPVC does not support QOS (all packets are treated equal), but it does transport the DSCP mapping. It is not reset to 0. I hear there are plan to support some sort of QOS in future versions...

regards,

Geert