Cisco Blade Switch and HP Blade server

[davy2k]

Dear All,
We have ESXi 4.0 an HP c3000 blade chassis with 4 half height blades installed in slot 1, 2, 5 and 6.

The blade chassis has a Cisco 3120 Blade switch with 4 10GB connection to a Cisco 4506E core switch and we would like to use the 4 copper ports on the Cisco 3120 blade switch to connect the VMs on the ESX to a Catalyst 3750 into a DMZ network.

My question is how do we make the copper ports on the Cisco Blade switch to be visible to the ESX blade servers (HP 460s)

In the ESX hosts only 4 ports are visible to each ESX servers.


I have searched the Cisco blade switch in the Blade chassis Onboard admin but nothing to map these ports.

Any links or how to will be very much appreciated.

Thanks you

 

[intelwizrd]

The switch module on the back of the c3000 is just like a switch in the rack. You connect the server port to a switch and it doesn't care about the other ports on the switch. In the c3000, the link between the 460 and the switch is hard wired and established when you insert the blade into the enclosure. ESX is probably only seeing the ports on the 4 blades connecting to the blade module.

You need to access the switch directly for specific configuration items (ie, vlans, trunking, UFD, port grouping). I have a c7000 with 16 blades and here is how i have mine setup.

The internal ports (1-16) are individually tagged with vlans.
Tagging on the external ports is enabled (ports on the back of the bladecenter switch)
The vlans are defined on the switch and for each vlan and include the internal ports and external ports if traffic from the inside passes to the rest of the network
Two of the external ports are used as uplinks to the network and configured as trunks on the network switch side
Since I have redundant switches and uplinks I also have enabled uplink failure detection (UFD) configured to disable the inside switch ports if the uplinks go down so the servers don't continue to try and pass traffic to a switch that has no communication to the network.