Flex-10 Technology; Managing Virtual And Physical Resources - Compaq BL10e - HP ProLiant - 512 MB RAM Introduction Manual

default World Wide Names (WWNs) for all host bus adapters (HBAs), the Virtual Connect Manager
creates bay-specific server profiles, assigns unique MAC addresses and WWNs to these profiles, and
administers them locally. Virtual Connect securely manages the MACs and WWNs by accessing the
physical NICs and HBAs through the enclosure's Onboard Administrator and the iLO interfaces on the
individual server blades. It allows these profiles to be modified and migrated without disturbing the
data center network administrator's view of the servers – to the external network, a c-Class
BladeSystem appears to be a collection of servers with static MAC and WWN assignments.
For more information about Virtual Connect technology, see the technology brief titled "HP Virtual
Connect technology implementation for the HP BladeSystem c-Class":
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00814156/c00814156.pdf.

Flex-10 technology

The most recent technology introduced as part of Virtual Connect is Flex-10 technology, which lets
customers partition a 10 Gb Ethernet connection and to regulate the size and data speed of each
partition. Administrators can configure a single 10 Gb network port to represent up to four physical
NIC devices, or FlexNICs, for a total bandwidth of 10 Gbps. Each dual-port Flex-10 device supports
up to eight FlexNICs, four on each physical port, and each Flex-10 Interconnect Module can support
up to 64 FlexNICs.
These FlexNICs appear to the operating system (OS) as discrete NICs, each with its own driver.
While the FlexNICs share the same physical port, traffic flow for each one is isolated with its own
MAC address and virtual local area network (VLAN) tags between the FlexNIC and VC Flex-10
interconnect module.
Significant infrastructure savings are also realized since additional server NIC mezzanine cards and
associated interconnect modules may not be needed, especially in a virtual machine environment
where multiple NICS are needed.
The ability to fine-tune each network connection dynamically from 100 Mb to 10 Gb in 100 Mb
increments helps eliminate bottlenecks. Because it has native 10 Gb, administrators can perform ultra-
fast virtual server moves and recoveries within a BladeSystem enclosure and between blades;
administrators can also precisely control the virtual server network traffic across backup, virtual
machine migration, management console, and production application channels.
For more information about Flex-10 technology, see the technology brief "HP Flex-10 technology" at
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01608922/c01608922.pdf.

Managing virtual and physical resources

The Virtual Connect solution includes the optional Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager (VCEM)
software that provides a central console to manage multiple Virtual Connect domains and efficiently
manage LAN and SAN connections across the domain. VCEM allows group-based configuration
management. It lets administrators assign, move, and perform failover of server-to-network
connections and their workloads for up to 150 BladeSystem enclosures (2400 servers). VCEM
provides a central pool of Virtual Connect LAN and SAN addresses, allowing customers to physically
or logically link multiple enclosures, and pre-provision the server-to-network connections in bulk.
Virtual Connect also enables the physical layer abstraction of servers in a resource pool, so that
administrators can use the concept of a logical server to describe either a virtual machine (virtual
machine-logical server, VM-LS) or a physical machine (physical machine-logical servers, PM-LS). HP
has developed tools such as HP Insight Dynamics – VSE and HP Insight Orchestration software to
manage both virtual and physical machines in a resource pool using the same methods (described in
more detail in the following sections). For more information about Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager
refer to www.hp.com/go/vcem
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