Emulex Configuring the LP21000 for NIC Teaming in ESX, Scaling to Enterprise Manageability

Configuring the LP21000 for NIC Teaming in ESX

NIC teaming occurs when multiple uplink adapters are associated with a single vSwitch to form a team. A team can share the load of traffic between physical and virtual networks or provide passive failover in the event of a hardware failure or network outage. Figure 14 shows the configuration of two vSwitches within an ESX server. The service console traffic is assigned to a vSwitch that in turn is connected to a 100 Mbps NIC. The second vSwitch provides networking for the VMkernel service and for a virtual machine. On the uplink, the vSwitch is connected to two LP21000 CNAs which provides redundancy through NIC teaming.

Figure 14: A network configuration where a vSwitch is uplinked with two CNAs for NIC teaming

Scaling to Enterprise Manageability

As FCoE-based convergence makes its way into enterprise data centers, one of the key requirements is the ability to manage both the FCoE and Fibre Channel SAN infrastructure without increasing the overall management complexity. Emulex provides software applications that streamline deployment, simplify management and virtualization as well as provide multipathing capabilities in mission critical environments. Emulex HBAnyware is a unified management platform for Emulex LightPulse Fibre Channel HBAs and FCoE CNAs. It provides a centralized console to manage Emulex HBAs and CNAs on local and remote hosts. Some new features of HBAnyware 4.0 include -

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