HP Virtual Connect Basics
August 9, 2012HP Virtual Connect is a great way to handle network setup for an HP Blade Chassis. When I first started with Virtual Connect it was very confusing for me to understand where everything was, and how the blades connected to the interconnect bays. This really is fairly simple, but might be confusing to anyone that’s new to this technology. Hopefully this post will give newcomers the tools they need to get started.
Downlinks
The HP interconnect modules have downlink and uplink ports. The uplink ports are pretty obvious, as they have a port on them that can be connected to a switch or another device. The downlink ports are less obvious. The downlinks exist between the interconnects and the blade bays. For example, in a c7000 chassis there are 16 server bays so an HP Flex-10 interconnect would have 16 downlink ports, one for each blade.
In the picture below of an HP VC Flex-10 Enet Module, there are 8 uplink ports, which are visible, as well as 16 downlink ports which are not visible, for a total of 24 ports.
Blade Mapping
Now that we’ve seen that each blade has connections to the interconnect via the downlink ports, lets take a closer look at how we see what NICs are mapped to which interconnect bay. HP Blades have two Lan On Motherboard (LOM) ports as well as room for two mezzanine cards. The mezzanine cards can contain a variety of different types of PCI devices, but in many cases they are populated with either NICS or HBAs.
The LOMs and Mezz Cards map in a specific order to the interconnect bays.
LOM1 – Interconnect Bay 1
Lom2 – Interconnect Bay 2
Mezz1 – Interconnect Bay 3 (and 4 if it’s a dual port card)
Mezz2 – Interconnect Bay 5 (and 6 if it’s a dual port card, 7 and 8 if it’s a quad port card)
The picture below should help to understand how the HP Blades map to the interconnect bays. This example uses dual port mezzanine cards.
LOM Ports with Flex-10
An additional thing can happen if you’ve got LOM FlexNICs as well as a Flex-10 Ethernet Module or Flex Fabric interconnect module. You can subdivide the LOM NICs into 4 Logical NICs. From here, your hypervisor or operating system will see 8 NICs instead of the original 2 NICs that would normally be there. This is an especially nice feature if you’re running virtualization, as you should now have plenty of network cards for vMotion, Fault Tolerance, Production Networks, and management networks.
As you can see from the following screenshot, the LOM NICs will be seperated into 4 Logical NICs labled 1-a, 1-b … 2-d.
I should also mention that if the interconnect modules are Flex Fabric, the LOM-1b and LOM-2b could be either an HBA or a NIC, your choice.
I know that these concepts seem fairly straight forward now, but to a beginner this is some very useful information to get started with HP Virtual Connect. I hope to have some more blog posts in the future about configuring networking with Virtual Connect.
[…] an overview of how HP blades are mapped to Virtual Connect Interconnect Modules in my last post. https://theithollow.com/2012/08/09/hp-virtual-connect-basics This post focus more on understanding the networks created through HP Virtual Connect […]
Thank you so so much..for a beginner like me, I got to know the Interconnect bay clearly.
Glad I found this blog and great post. I may have one of these new blades dropped in my lap. Looks like this flex feature is similar to UCS VIC. I’m wondering about any of the gotchas, especially where FCOE is concerned.
thanks for sharing…really helpfull
I have one doubt, can i connect my laptop directly into the vcflex uplink port,with my laptop having the same subnet as of blades and access them, or i need to route via switch(vcflex–switch–laptop).
That’s some good bloggin’. Nice connectivity picture also. From the GUI screenshot, it looks like Eris’s setup has Flex10 blade LOMs but the mezzanie card is non-Flex10, so no a,b,c,d there like for the LOM.
Thanks. Very informative & simple explanation which got my head clear as i am a new bee to HP VC.
Thanks for the feedback.
good post. easy to follow and understand. thanks a lot for this one/.
Nice blog…
Thank you
Great article
Hey,
This is a very interesting post;I hope I can find a solution to my problem which is stacking my institution and nobody is working.
I have 8 blades on which the esxi and vmware are deployed around 70virtual machines were created.
Few days ago due to power outage the system went down and 6/8 blades can`t be reached on the network and don`t display anything on VC flex fabric,lcd display of the blade and on Onboard administrator nothing indicates the presented error.
Could you please help to diagnose and know the reason and solve the problem?
All LEDs are lighting GREEN and nothing shows a problem.
Kindly help
Jules,
My first instinct would be to re-seat the HP Blades, but my second one would be to call support. Everything was working fine before the power outage? If so, sounds like something got corrupted or you lost an unsaved running config or something. Sorry I can’t be of more help here but this would require further investigation my a support team.
Good luck with your troubleshooting. Thank you for reading.
Hello,I forget to mention that when entering in my Flex Fabric,there is an error saying “Stacking Links” and when browsing the iLo I came somewhere on the window and shows “Link is down” for my specific blade server which is a host with IP:172.16.X.X.
Please help,I thank you.!!
great post is there any chance t get the simulator for VC ?
You would need an HP Account to gain access to that. Please contact your HP representative for help.
Very beautiful explainations..
Thanks you
hello, I have HP virtual connect simulator version 2.30. Can anybody tell me a password for default administrator username? I can’t find it and sign in. Thanks.
Hello all –
Glad I found this site. Newb to the HP vc and trying to have it make nice with my Arista core switch.
Using OneView to config the VC and upgrade my network to the 20/40G speed.
I can see packets sending from my switch to the VC, but not getting anything from the VC.
Hours of support with the vendor has still left me with the problem of this device not working.
Help!
Why is it that when I create another uplink set, it states standby standby? I wanted to configure a whole new uplink not associated with the current UPLINK set… Further, can you have multiple uplink sets for the same blade?
Excellent Piece of very vital information explained in a simple way. Thanks Eric ! wish you would come up with many more like these !