Collection of useful, relevant or inane places on the the Internets for 23 Aug 10:
- HP Virtual Connect for DummiesÆ ñ Compliments of HP – Go here to download a free copy of the Virtual Connect for Dummies book. You may not like it, but you probably have to work with it.
The HP Virtual Connect team is pleased to announce that HP Virtual Connect for DummiesÆ is now available as an e-book for the first 2,500 people who register. Simply fill out the form below and learn:
How HP Virtual Connect simplifies your data center, lowers costs, and saves time
About the HP Virtual Connect product family
How Virtual Connect speeds up server adds and changes - HP Blogs – HP Virtual Connect: The versatility of flexibility – The HP Blog Hub -
By deploying VC FlexFabric modules and FlexFabric Adapters throughout your infrastructure ñ you are never faced with the question of needing more network switches vs. storage switches ñ or NICs vs. HBAs when workload demands change.
What tosh. You still need network and SAN ports, but they must be connected to bigger and more expensive switches. The cost is just moved around in HP’s favour and plays to their market strength in servers.
- RFC 2285 – Benchmarking Terminology for LAN Switching Devices -
This document is intended to provide terminology for the benchmarking of local area network (LAN) switching devices. It extends the terminology already defined for benchmarking network interconnect devices in RFCs 1242 and 1944 to switching devices.
Next time your switching vendor vomits up big numbers for performance, check that they are using RFC2285 compliant process to make those assertions.
- HP Blogs – Storage Networking, the way you want it – The HP Blog Hub -
In addition to full iSCSI offload, the Virtual Connect FlexFabric module supports and manages iSCSI boot.† The iSCSI boot parameters can be managed as part of the Virtual Connect server profile, creating a stateless server using a cost effective iSCSI boot device. †This capability was only available on Native Fibre Channel in previous versions of Virtual Connect, now itís available on all storage protocols supported by the Virtual Connect FlexFabric module; Fibre Channel, FCoE and iSCSI.
Much as I loathe Virtual Connect for its complexity and stupid design parameters, at least they have delivered a viable iSCSI solution for blade / chassis servers. I’ll be taking a closer look at this.
- BRAD HEDLUND .com ª Cisco UCS intelligent QoS vs. HP Virtual Connect rate limiting -
he HP rate limiting approach does the basic job of providing each virtual adapter guaranteed access to link bandwidth, but does so in a way that results in massively inefficient use of all available network I/O bandwidth.† Not all bandwidth is available to each virtual adapter from the start, even under normal non-congested conditions.† As the administrator of HP Virtual Connect, you need to define the maximum bandwidth for traffic such as VMotion, VM data, IP storage, etc. (something less than 10GE) and from the very start that traffic will not be able to transmit any faster, there is an immediate consequence.
Brad points out the fact that Virtual Connect modules on the HP are not networking technology. HP needs to ditch this technology and embrace networking.
- Cisco Nexus 7000 Series OTV Documentation Roadmap† [Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches] – Cisco Systems -
This document describes the user documentation available for the Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV) on the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series products. To find a document online, use one of the links in this document.
