HP’s Virtual Connect technology offerings are all about consolidation of network and fiber channel, much in the same way that blade chassis are to the physical server offerings. Â Virtual Connect allows for fewer physical connections to be shared and flexibly assigned to blades within an HP BladeSystem. Â I have been using this technology for going on a couple years and I can say, Â it works great. Â Virtual Connect is also about flexibility and options. Â The technology buys the ability to create a profile for a server with virtual MAC and WWID and have those move with the profile from blade server to blade server and have the blade boot on different hardware quickly. Â We employ that functionality as a semi-disaster recovery for quick recovery if we lose a blade server due to a hardware problem.
Virtual Connect is about consolidation by reducing the number of physical connections required. Â From the fiber channel modules, two 4-port VC-Fiber modules connect an entire chassis to the fabric, and then using NPIV, the fiber channel traffic is sent to individual blade servers within the chassis. Â The 16 blade slots all share the 4 ports of each VC module.
The new development on the ethernet Virtual Connect side is a technology known as Flex-10. Â Flex-10 Â is a new technology which helps to overcome some of the traditional challenges of blades (such as lack of NICs) when looking at blades for virtualization projects. Â Virtual Connect Flex-10 allows up to 4 times as many NIC connections per blade server. Â In a simliar way to the fiber channel implementation, a single Flex-10 physical NIC (pNIC) on a blade server can be divided into 4 logical NICs or FlexNICs. Â These FlexNICs can be configured to different port speeds and capacities.
A blade server with two integrated Flex-10 NICs will have 8 logicial FlexNICs on the motherboard, and each one of those has it’s own MAC address. Â These MAC addresses, like earlier blade NICs, can be overridden in the Virtual Connect server profiles and can be assigned virtualized MAC addresses, so the Flex-10 servers get the same portability that earlier server profiles in Virtual Connect offered.
The Flex-10 technology is a two parter – requiring both Flex-10 Ethernet modules on the interconnect bays of the blade enclosure and Flex-10 NICs in the blade servers. Â Fortunately for companies with existing investments, the Flex-10 Ethernet interconnect modules are backwards compatible with earlier integrated NICs on your existing blades.
Each FlexNIC can be sized from 100Mb up to a full 10Gb speeds in 100MB increments. Â The incredible thing, is that with the two available mezzanine cards and the integrated pNIC’s, Flex-10 technology allows for up to 24 FlexNICs per blade – an incredible amount in a such a compact space.
We have plans of implementing this technology, so hopefully I can post a follow up from personal experiences once we begin that project.
