Comments on: How does an HP Fibre Channel Virtual Connect Module Work?

By: satish

satish — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 18:08:56 +0000

VC does need external switching. and VC compliements Virtualization Technology, however its not a replacement of any Hypervisor in the market.
VC along with FlexFabric gives you a 10Gbc Pipe that can be split to multiple 1Gb NICs and also to a 4gbps FC fabric.
The advantage :
Can control the Bandwidth according to the traffic on any given NIC and the remaining bandwidth can be worked upon to the FC path.
Aviods Multiiple Cable Sprawling, since only single mode fabric is used and controlled. Hence even Management becomes easy.
Proliant Blades are enable on-board with 10Gb Bandwidth, hence you do not need additional mezzaine for your FC ( cost Saving).
Complimented by HP midplane technology of Serailizer and Deserailzer, this is one of the best in terms of performance !!

By: Resources for HP c-class blade and EVA Design for vSphere 4 « Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 10:41:58 +0000

[...] How does a Virtual Connect FC Module work? (warning – old and outdated with current firmware) [...]

By: Confused by HP Flex10 Design for vSphere « Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 10:32:08 +0000

[...] my HP, EVA, c-series blade resources can be found here and my original How does Virtual Connect Work? guide (now very out of date) is here [...]

By: Hardware Vendors… release the emulators to the masses PLEASE!! « Virtualization, Windows, Infrastructure and all that “stuff” in-between

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 10:14:25 +0000

[...] have also been reliably informed that there is a version of the HP Virtual Connect “firmware” used internally at HP that runs inside VMware Workstation – making this available to the public [...]

By: vinf

vinf — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 23:10:03 +0000

sorry for delay in approving your comment, it was stuck in my spam queue

in a nutshell;

Virtual Connect = abstraction, configure your SAN zoning and LUN masking once by using the virtual WWN of the VC modules; if you swap out the blade and/or HBA mezzanine card.

Integrated blade switches = more switches in your DC, more spanning tree and more management and you need to manage a core, distribution and edge switch topology.

If VM’s do a lot of talking to each-other within the same chassis, then maybe switches rather than VC are a better approach – keep all traffic within the chassis rather than trunking out to external switches and back in again – VC modules do have private networks but they are not L3 routeable to the outside world IIRC

VC always needs external switches, so extra cost but easy swap out and configure once.

By: vc-newbie

vc-newbie — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 07:10:22 +0000

could you please tell me what are the pros and cons when using VC versus no VC (SAN Switch,Ethernet Switch) ?

for example

with VC we can achieve …..
but we can not have ….

with SAN/Ethernet (non VC)
we can…
but we can not….

TIA

By: vinf

vinf — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 12:55:16 +0000

In this instance we used VC modules as they alias the WWN of the HBA inside a blade, so the storage admins can setup the zoning, switches etc. once and if we have to swap out a blade due to hardware failure the FC modules make it transparent and there are no changes required on the SAN side as we always map to “virtual” WWN’s owned by the VC modules.

think of it as NAT, but for fibre-channel

I belive the same sort of principal applies for the VC-Ethernet modules.

HTH

By: vc-headache

vc-headache — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 09:03:21 +0000

simple question

why use vc ?

will it ease my life,budget ?

By: vc-headache

vc-headache — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 08:43:39 +0000

simple question.

why should i use vc instead of san-switches?

will it ease my life,budget ?

By: vinf

vinf — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:27:49 +0000

Yes, I belive that is the case with newer firmware; which is a massive improvement.