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HP has released a significant firmware update to its Virtual Connect line of HP Blade chassis switches.

This is part 6 of a 6 part post on HP Virtual Connect 4.01:

1. HP Virtual Connect 4.01: What’s New
2. HP Virtual Connect 4.01: Dual-hop FcOE support
3. HP Virtual Connect 4.01: Min/Max Bandwidth Optimisation
4. HP Virtual Connect 4.01: Priority Queue QoS
5. HP Virtual Connect 4.01: SNMP and sFlow enhancements
6. HP Virtual Connect 4.01: RBAC and Multicast + some more

Custom role-based configuration

VC 4.01 now also adds more options for role customisation.

You can split your administration into Storage Admin, Server Admin, Network Admin and Domain User.

You can now configure more operational permissions for these users and the GUI will show you what will change when you are about to apply the new permission.

Multicast Filtering

VC 4.01 enables multicast filtering without flooding for authorised applications. Admins can configure authorised application to a Multicast stream.

Authorised applications can then subscribe to a multicast stream. VC will only send  multicast streams to subscribed applications and and other attempts by unauthorised applications to subscribe are blocked.

Other 4.01 enhancements

There is now a configurable LACP timer (30 sec or 1 sec) which is useful when doing in-service upgrades of Cisco firmware which need a 30-second long timer to avoid LACP timeout during the upgrade.

This can be configured at the domain level or per connection.

Pause Flood protection has been added to protect against link layer flooding.

There is also now a configurable GUI session timeout and also CLI tab completion.

That’s all!