HP blade xw460c blade manual Virtual Connect Manager screen for Ethernet settings

ISS Technology Update Volume 6, Number 9

and continue to provide backward compatibility, although it is expected that almost all future discrete I/O devices, regardless of their bandwidth requirements, will be developed to the PCIe standard.

HP has been a leader in the development and implementation of industry-standard I/O technology and continues to be a core member of the PCI Special Interest Group. HP is committed to delivering industry-leading products that meet customer requirements for flexibility, performance, and investment protection.

Port monitoring in Virtual Connect for the c-Class BladeSystem

The ability to monitor Ethernet settings (port monitoring) is available in a free Virtual Connect (VC) firmware update. This feature is available to users with server and network administrator privileges. All other users will have read-only access. To use port monitoring, all modules within the domain must be using Virtual Connect Manager 1.20a1 or higher.

There are two steps to monitoring an Ethernet port.

1.Configure Virtual Connect to mirror to the desired server NIC traffic to an “analyzer” port (available in 1.20a and higher)

2.Connect a network sniffer or analyzer to the analyzer port

Port monitoring allows an administrator to duplicate the network traffic over a set of server ports and send it to an unused uplink port for the purpose of monitoring or debugging network traffic.

•Any unused port on a VC-Ethernet module can be specified as the port monitoring port (one per enclosure).

•Any server Network Interface card’s ingress or egress (or both) traffic can be mirrored to that port.

Administrators can access port monitoring through the Virtual Connect Manager over the same Ethernet connection used to access the HP Onboard Administrator and iLO connections (Figure 3-1).

Figure 3-1. Virtual Connect Manager screen for Ethernet settings

1Version 1.20a is available for download from http://h18023.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/download/28035.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN.

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