Comments on: HP Virtual Connect Review

By: Brad Hedlund

Brad Hedlund — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:54:11 +0000

Hi Brent,

For the record, you won this bet. I concede.
According to my sources, as of December 2009, 15% of vSphere licenses had Enterprise Plus attached, which is required to purchase Nexus 1000V.

As much as I want to believe that 100% of those 15% purchased Nexus 1000V, we all know that can’t be possible. So I concede this one.

Cheers,
Brad

By: Barry

Barry — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 06:41:59 +0000

Peter, you may want to take a look at HP’s new Flex-10 Virtual Connect. It is an upgrade from HP’s original VC, and adds huge advantages:

1- As for “that thing” sitting between your server, and network, the Flex-10 interconnects talk to the Nexus 1000v.
2- Flex-10 interconnects in combination with the integrated or mezzanine Flex-10 blade adapters, gives you the equivalent of 8 NICs on a single adapter, shared between two physical ports. Each port has 10Gb speed, shareable between it’s 4 adapters, and adjustable for each NIC in 100k increments. So, while the default is 2.5Gb per NIC, you can adjust that up and down to a max of 10Gb per port.
3- With the Flex-10 interconnects, you only need TWO to accommodate 16 blades in a c7000 enclosure, each with 8 Flex-NICS per blade already integrated. (You can add an additional Flex-10 mezz card per blade, and two more Flex-10 interconnects for an ADDITIONAL 8 Flex-NICs per blade).

This completely mitigates the I/O limitations of other/previous blades/interconnects in a VMware based environment.

The G6 blades are out, and as memory goes, a c-Class Half-Height blade (of which you can get 16 in a single chassis), will give you up to 192GB of DDR3 RAM, and up to 256GB RAM with 4×6-core procs on a full height blade.

HP was very forward thinking with the c7000 blade enclosure, and kept it as “open-architecture” as possible, which manages to embrace future technologies. It will accommodate up to 4 redundant fabrics, 16 blades, and the best management architecture I’ve seen (and I’ve worked with most vendor blade technologies).

Good luck with your search.

By: Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 23:17:18 +0000

Peter – there is no perfect future solution. It sounds like you’re asking for someone to build a long-term strategy for your business IT needs. That’s outside of the scope of what you can get in a blog comment. You might consider engaging a consultant with experience building these types of solutions. If you need help finding one, email me at brento@brentozar.com and I can put you in touch with one.

By: Peter

Peter — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:28:01 +0000

All,
I’m an opertion manager in the trenches. I have to meet today’s continous business demand for application solutions while focusing on cost (capex,opex.) So how do I reponsibly meet today’s demands while waiting for vendors to provide the perfect solution?

How Can I use the HP Virtual Connect to meet today’s needs and then transition to the next “perfect” futue solution? We are currently doing it on 2 demensions; rack servers to blades, Single OS per server to VM’s. I need to start virtualizing the the I/O for reasons you are aware of.

Please remember us “operations focs” have to keep working on the “house” (datac center) while it is in use 24/7/365. I need a balanced approach.

Thanks