Best Practices for HP BladeSystem Deployments using HP Serviceguard Solutions for HP-UX 11i (May 2010)

Figure 8: Example of Stacked Virtual Connect Ethernet Modules

Fiber Channel SAN Connectivity

2-port Fiber Channel Mezzanine cards are available for connecting server blades to a SAN

infrastructure. HP recommends using two FC Mezzanine cards for redundancy to eliminate the

Mezzanine cards as a SPOF. When using Virtual Connect Fiber Channel modules, HP recommends

deploying the modules as side-by-side interconnect bay pairs for module redundancy with each Fiber

Channel port. Note that Virtual Connect Fiber Channel modules do not have any interdependencies

or mechanisms within the modules themselves to support VC-FC module failure failover as do Virtual

Connect Ethernet modules.

Multi-pathing for Fiber Channel links can be provided by using HP-UX 11i v3 native multi-pathing,

LVM PV (Physical Volume) Links or VERITAS DMP (Dynamic Multi-Pathing). Serviceguard monitoring

and failover triggered by a failed Fiber Channel link can be accomplished by using the EMS Disk

Monitor for LVM by configuring a package dependency on EMS disk monitor, or by using the VxVM

Volume Monitor that was available starting with Serviceguard A.11.18. Information on using EMS

Monitors is available at http://www.docs.hp.com/en/B5735-90001/ch01s04.html and rules for

using the HA Disk Monitor with Serviceguard is available at http://www.docs.hp.com/en/B5736-

90074/ch02s02.html . The VxVM Volume Monitor is documented in the Managing Serviceguard

Manual, which is available at http://docs.hp.com/en/B3936-90140/B3936-90140.pdf.

HP Virtual Connect (VC) High Availability Server Profile Configurations

Instead of having to physically wire LAN and SAN connections to specific blade servers, HP Virtual

Connect (VC) server profiles provide the ability to virtually “wire” individual LAN and Fibre Channel

ports to specific networks and SANs by associating multiple network ports from one or more server

blades with one or more external output ports on a VC Ethernet card. From a Serviceguard-

perspective, if both the primary and standby LANs for a server blade shared the same output port on

the same Virtual Connect module, there would only be protection against a failure of the network port

on the Mezzanine card. A failure of the Virtual Connect module or the external switch connected to

the output port on that module would still be a SPOF.