I have had the pleasure today of presenting at the second UK VMware User Group. at the National Motorcycle Museum in Solihull, near Birmingham.
My presentation was titled vSphere Networking and Converged IO with Blade Servers.
I discussed how converged networking incorporating 10GE and FCoE is become more important as we try to utilise bandwidth more efficiently which is especially important with blade servers which have limited IO expansion. I explained the architecture of Cisco UCS and HP Virtual Connect as examples and how they can work with vSphere.
I went through some of the IO convergence options and also how to still protect your traffic by using either physical or logical separation or software.
No need to repeat everything else in this blog post, you may as well have a look at the presentation and best of all plan to attend a VMUG near you!
Categories: Flex-10, HP, VMUG, VMware Tags: cisco, Flex-10, hp, networking, storage, UCS, vmware, vmworld
When deploying HP Flex-10 switches in your racks, one of the things that is often overlooked is ensuring you have the correct upstream switch port configuration.
Your Flex-10 switches make up only one half of your network topology and need to be connected to upstream switches to complete the networking design. I’m going to use the example of Cisco upstream switches.
I’ve blogged previously on my ideas for a Flex-10 ESX design with simplicity and scalability, See Part 1 and Part 2
Ensuring your Flex-10 uplinks are connected to your upstream switch ports correctly is vital to ensure your Flex-10 infrastructure is always available and stable.
You may also have separate teams of people who look after your Flex-10 switches and your upstream Cisco switches as HP Flex-10 has often been sold as a networking technology which is easy enough to implement by server engineers and so may not be supported by your networking team. Always ensure your teams are talking to each other to fully understand the technology as finger pointing when things go wrong is the last thing you need!
HP has published a few documents to assist Cisco people in understanding Flex-10:
Read more…
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