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Can you connect a Virtual Connect Flex-10 module directly to a storage array?

by Kleinch on 08-19-2011 02:46 PM

There was a good internal discussion about a customer looking to hook his Virtual Connect Flex-10 modules directly to their HP Storage P4300 iSCSI SAN arrays and acting as a "switch" between the P4300s.  The discussion was whether this was possible, a good idea, a bad idea or..??? Could the VC Flex-10 provide "switch" style communication between the 2 SAN arrays?

 

At least a number of the engineers said you needed to have a layer 2 or layer 3 switch to make it a good solution. And the best advice I think came from Cullen when looking at VC Flex-10 modules and external devices:

 

The things you need to be aware of if you connect things directly to the Flex10 are:

 

1. The external devices will not be able to talk to each other via Flex10.

2. The external devices will not be able to talk to anything outside the enclosure via the Flex10.

3. The external devices will only be able to talk to devices in the enclosure within the networks defined for the uplinks.

4. If you connect more than one uplink to an external device, only one of those will be active.

 

Any experience in this area? What have you tried?

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Comments
by pedro.leite on 09-08-2011 12:00 AM
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Number 4 is a pain... but true, if you have multiple links (like on a P2000 with 10GbE) you get up/down events all the time.

 

You can actually make 4 uplinks and most of them will stay up, and you can use several hosts consuming each of those uplinks... one network for each one.

 

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by Prasad (anon) on 10-13-2011 01:10 PM
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Hi Kleinch , 

 

This is good info here , we are seeing many customers trying to connect the P4000 SAN directly to flex 10 cards . Though we say it is not supported , I was unable to give a valid explanation . 

As  you mentioned , the externel  devices connected to flex10 can't communicate each other , is defenitely will not help this as P4000  SAN is a clustering solution and communication between the  nodes are must .

 

Many Thanks 

Cheers 

Prasad

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About the Author
  • Cynthia is part of the BCS marketing team. Interested in all things mission-critical and what's next on the horizon.
  • Ken is a cloud Architect in the CloudSystem team. Ken focuses on software, servers, Virtual Connect, networking and server virtualization to enable cloud solutions. Ken also develops white papers and best practices as part of the BladeSystem Readiness Team. You can find him on Twitter as @BladeGuy.
  • Hello! I am on the HP Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking team, focused on Interactive Web and Social Media Marketing for (ISS) Industry Standard Servers. I will be sharing relevant ISS and HP news & info as it crosses my path.
  • Greetings! I am in the HP Converged Infrastructure team focused on Server, Storage & Networking group at HP and will be sharing news & info as it crosses my path.
  • Network industry experience for more than 20 years - Data Center, Voice over IP, security, remote access, routing, switching and wireless, with companies such as HP, Cisco, Juniper Networks and Novell.
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