I still see and read on the forums that there is a lot of confusion in what the requirements are with HP Flex-10 and VMware Vsphere…..Back in January, some people were using beacon probing to be sucessful in active/active configurations however it isn’t needed today. In order for success and to avoid a lot of confusion here is a quick summation of what you need to be successful with active/active HP Flex-10 and VMware Vsphere.
The three components for success are:
1) You need to use the VMware 1.52 driver http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/esx_esxi_40_broadcom_bnx2_dt/ZCV0YmRqZHRidHdw
Now just to make it interesting you may run across an issue with VMware stating it isnt an authorized driver cd….You can fix that by following this: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1017401
2) Flex-10 should be upgraded to 2.30 or higher 3.x is out….http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodNameId=3794431&prodTypeId=3709945&prodSeriesId=3794423&swLang=13&taskId=135&swEnvOID=1005
3.) Your nic bootcode version should also be higher than 5.0.11…This is really easy even the firmware maintainence dvd from last Januarary had it….Best part is the firmware maintainance dvd is unintended install.
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/core-management-100.html
9 Responses to “Three Requirements for HP Flex-10 and Virtual Connect with VMware Vsphere 4”
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Hi Jeff,
I Have a c7000 enclosure with inline flex-10-10gb vc interconnect modules using the cx4 10gb port on each side up to a cisco 6509.
My question is can you aggregate (lacp) the CX4 links over two inline flex-10-10gb modules? This would make it one 20gb aggregated link, if not can you do active / active with the cx4 across two inline 10gb interconnects?
the reason i ask is that ive tried it (pretty much in the first few months the product was out) but it didnt work. I didnt know about the vmware driver ive been using the esxi from hp.
Nikon-
Good question. You cant do active/active with one uplink from each adjacent switch then lacp the two uplinks. You have to have it physically connected much like a SAN where you have two sides each independent of the other. In this post linked hereI show the physical topology and then there is 2 more post following that dive into the full configuration in both ESX/ESXi and HP Virtual Connect Flex-10.
Hope that helps! Not sure what the roadmap is with the new flex fabric and how things change…
ok so i could have them both active but independent of each other to the same switch without LACP and basically mirror my vlans down each side, this didnt work in the past but i think if i use the driver, vc 3.x and bootcode i may have some luck. the problem i had was there was no failover or load balancing from the vswitching.
this caused me to go to an active 10g and a failover on the other 10g, which sucks cos its a waste of bandwidth
Your flex-10 switch on the left lets call it A could have two uplinks to one 6509 using LACP; call that A side then your other flex-10 switch could have 2 uplinks to your other 6509 call that B….You cant cross uplinks though like one uplink from one switch side going to different 6509s it will fail…
If you do this configuration a side and b side you can shutdown a flex-10 switch and still be running. On your vswitch you take an uplink from each side so that you have failover and redundancy…I have never had an issue, but all my drivers have always been in check. I shutdown switches to check removed uplinks etc etc….If you try this with 4.1 read the advisory I posted today….
In my current production I run multiple c7000 enclosures together with multiple vsphere clusters each cluster has a few servers from each chassis…
hi jeff,
the problem i have is that we only have one 6509 and only the cx4 link on each of the 10gb flex 10 interconnect switches. can i run it in active active without LAG? so that im not wasting 10gig in a standby/failover?
budget constraints mean i cant do the full redundant config as you’ve described.
Nick-
Correct you can do it as described. I wouldn’t do active/standby.
yeah thats it, a year and half ago i 2.3 fw for flex 10 was just out, we couldnt get it working active / active so we settled for active / standby. I’m going to give it another go with 4.1, vc 3.x and the drivers for vmware.
Btw, did you see the last post on this thread:
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/273033?start=0&tstart=0
driver: bnx2x
version: 1.54.1.v41.1-1vmw
firmware-version: BC:5.2.7 PHY:baa0:0105
maybe this driver is newer and fixes the flex-10 vc issues with esxi 4.1?
Nick-
Yeah that post is mostly 4.1….I run 4.0 update 2 in production and dr….Anyhow, with 4.1 you need to go back to beacon probing too….