How does an HP Fibre Channel Virtual Connect Module Work? Virtualiz...

http://vinf.net/2008/04/09/how-does-an-hp-fibre-channel-virtual-connect...

Techhead and I have spent a lot of time recently scratching our heads over how and where fibre channel SAN connections go in a c7000 blade chassis. If you dont know, a FC-VC module looks like this, and you install them in redundant pairs in adjacent interconnect bays at the rear of the chassis.

You then patch each of the FC Ports into a FC switch. The supported configuration is one FC-VC Module to 1 FC switch (below)

Connecting one VC module to more than one FC switch is unsupported (below)

So, in essence you treat each VC module as terminating all HBA Port 1s and the other FC-VC module as terminating all HBA Port 2s.

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10/13/2011 11:33 AM

How does an HP Fibre Channel Virtual Connect Module Work? Virtualiz...

http://vinf.net/2008/04/09/how-does-an-hp-fibre-channel-virtual-connect...

The setup we had: A number of BL460c blades with dual-port Qlogic Mezzanine card HBAs. HP c7000 Blade chassis with 2 x FC-VC modules plugged into interconnect bay 3 & 4 (shown below)

The important point to note is that whilst you have 4 uplinks on each FC-VC module that does not mean you have 2 x 16Gb/s connection pool or trunk that you just connect into. Put differently if you unplug one, the overall bandwidth does not drop to 12Gb/s etc. it will disconnect a single HBA port on a number of servers and force them to failover to the other path and FC-VC module. It does not do any dynamic load balancing or anything like that it is literally a physical port concentrator which is why it needs NPIV to pass through the WWNs from the physical blade HBAs. There is a concept of over-subscription, in the Virtual Connect GUI thats managed by setting the number of uplink ports used. Most people will probably choose 4 uplink ports per VC module, this is 4:1 oversubscription, meaning each FC-VC port (and there are 4 per module) has 4 individual HBA ports connected to it, if you reduce the numeber of uplinks you increase the oversubscription (2 uplinks = 8:1 oversubscription, 1 uplink = 16:1 oversubscription)

Which FC-VC Port does my blades HBA map to? The front bay you insert your blade into determines which individual 4Gb/s port it maps to and shares with other blades) on the FC-VC module, its not just a virtual pool of connections, this is important when you plan your deployment as it can affect the way failover works. the following table is what we found from experimentation and a quick glance at the HP Virtual Connect Cookbook (more on this later)

FC-VC Port

Maps to HBA in Blade Chassis Bay, and these ports are also shared by..

Bay3-Port 1, Bay-4-Port 1 Bay3-Port 2, Bay-4-Port 2 Bay3-Port 3, Bay-4-Port 3 Bay3-Port 4, Bay-4-Port 4

1,5,11,15 2,6,12,16 3,7,9,13 4,8,10,14

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10/13/2011 11:33 AM

How does an HP Fibre Channel Virtual Connect Module Work? Virtualiz...

http://vinf.net/2008/04/09/how-does-an-hp-fibre-channel-virtual-connect...

Each individual blade has a dual port HBA, so for example the HBA within the blade in bay 12 maps out as follows

Looking at it from a point of a single SAN attached Blade the following diagram is how it all should hook together

Path Failover Unplugging an FC cable from bay 3, port 4 will disconnect one of the HBA connections to all of the blades in bays 4,8,10 and 14 and force the blades host OS to handle a failover to its secondary path via the FC-VC module in bay 4.

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10/13/2011 11:33 AM