Installation guide

A Sample VLAN Topology

Chapter 7

IMPORTANT When setting up the eth0 through eth5 network interfaces on your Server Blades, remember

that any assigned IP address on these interfaces must reside within the base or fabric network

domains that you have already established for the Switch Blades.

NOTE The external Ethernet interface mapping described in Table 7-1 on page 94 may vary,

depending on how your Linux kernel is configured and in what order the kernel detects the

physical network interfaces present on the Server Blade. Table 7-1 represents the mapping as

seen by the Debian (2.6 Kernel) Linux OS.

Serial access to the HP bc2100 ATCA Server Blade is provided through an RJ-45 connector located below the

four LAN ports (and just above the two USB connectors) on the Server Blade front panel. Serial access

(RS-232) is set to 8 data bits, 1 stop bit, no parity, and 9600 baud.

NOTE You must use an RJ-45/DB-9 adapter cable (supplied with your HP bh5700 ATCA 14-Slot Blade

Server) in combination with a modem eliminator cable (with a DB-9 female connector on each

end) in order to connect your terminal or laptop computer to a serial port on the 14-Slot Shelf.

The Server Blade BIOS controls the activation of the four LAN fabric ports on the Server Blade front panel. If

the four LAN fabric ports are not active on the front panel, then they connect into the fabric domain of the

Switch Blades through the 14-Slot Shelf blade cage backplane.

NOTE There is no designated out-of-band (OOB) LAN port for the Server Blade, as there is for the

Ethernet Switch Blades and the ShMMs.

Configuring the 14-Slot Blade Server for High Availability

High availability (HA) is a feature implemented within the Ethernet Switch Blades, and taken advantage of

the HP bc2100 ATCA Server Blades. This feature is also more formally known as Surviving Partner.

The Ethernet Switch Blades High Availability is implemented in the Ethernet Switch Blade using the

Inter-Switch Link (ISL / vlan4) that connects the two Switch Blades. In addition to the ISL, the Switch Blade

also employs the Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol, also known as vrrp. The vrrp protocol is implemented

as a daemon (vrrpd) that runs whenever the surviving partner software is enabled.

NOTE The vrrpd daemon is an open source (GPL) project. You can download this code from the

following URL: https://sourceforge.net/projects/vrrpd.

The surviving partner software enables you to configure two Ethernet Switch Blades to act as a

Master/Backup pair, with three distinct failover modes available. You can specify the type of failover event

that will cause the backup Switch Blade to take over switching operations.

The three available HA failover modes are:

• Port failover – an individual network link can failover to the backup Switch Blade.

• VLAN failover – any link failure in a defined VLAN causes the entire VLAN to failover to the backup

Switch Blade.

• Switch failover – any link failure on the entire Switch Blade causes all links (including all defined

VLANs) to failover to the backup Switch Blade.