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.

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