Hp Flex-10 For Virtual Connect; New Capabilities Supported By Flex-10 Technology; Flex-10 Nic Device; Flexnic - Compaq BL10e - HP ProLiant - 512 MB RAM Introduction Manual

Bandwidth constraints on multiple, concurrent production applications such as iSCSI and virtual
machine migration
Limited separation of production applications
Limited dedicated redundant backup
No room for advanced services such as NIC teaming
As an example, HP ProLiant c-Class blade servers limit the number of interconnect bay modules,
requiring a trade-off among Fibre Channel, Ethernet, InfiniBand, and other network types. For Fibre
Channel and Ethernet, there is a practical limit of six NICs and two host bus adapters (HBAs).

HP Flex-10 for Virtual Connect

With adoption of 10GbE, the problem is not bandwidth; it is the lack of ability to direct, partition,
and regulate data streams for efficient operation. HP is answering these issues with Flex-10, the next
phase of HP Virtual Connect Technology.
As stated in the introduction of this paper, Flex-10 technology is hardware-based. Hardware-based
FlexNICs eliminate the processor overhead required to operate virtualized NICs in a virtual machine
environment. Flex-10 also utilizes the capabilities of VC to manage up to 24 FlexNICs on a single,
half-height BladeSystem server which keeps the respective data traffic moving through each FlexNIC.

New capabilities supported by Flex-10 technology

The unique set of capabilities provided by Flex-10 makes 10GbE more flexible and efficient and
enhances the ability of VC to consolidate servers and manage services. Implementing a
hardware-based technology within a virtual architecture can lead to confusion about what Flex-10
technology is, and what it is not. This section expands on the basic ideas and descriptions used for
Flex-10 technology.

Flex-10 NIC device

Flex-10 NIC devices are dual-port 10Gb LAN on Motherboard (LOM) devices and mezzanine cards
that support up to four FlexNICs on each port. The Flex-10 device contains eight separate PCI
functions, four per port, that enable the FlexNICs.

FlexNIC

A FlexNIC is an actual PCI-e function recognized by the server ROM as an individual NIC. A FlexNIC
is not a virtual NIC contained in a software layer. The administrator controls the transmit bandwidth
available to each FlexNIC. Each FlexNIC can be fine tuned from 100Mb to 10Gb through the VC
interface.

Flex-10 port

A Flex-10 port is a single 10Gb full-duplex internal midplane connection between the Flex-10 NIC
device and the Virtual Connect Flex-10 10GbE interconnect module.

Virtual Connect Flex-10 10GbE interconnect module

This module recognizes Flex-10 connections from the server as part of a Virtual Connect server
profile. The module also supports non-Flex-10, 10Gb NICs and traditional 1Gb LOMs and mezzanine
cards. Like other Virtual Connect interconnect modules, it is not a traditional switch device, but rather
an IEEE-compliant Ethernet bridging device.
Information on HP teaming can be found at -
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http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/networking/teaming.html
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