Mar 30 2009 2:07AM GMT

Server 2008 HyperV, HP BL 480c and failover with a MSA 2012i

Roger Crawford Profile: Roger Crawford

I know I have been talking about the project I have going on at one customer site. We got a HP c7000 and in this we have 2 BL 480c Blades with dual QC CPU’s 48 Gig RAM, 4 NICs and 4 146–HDs and we also have a HP MSA 2012i iSCSI SAN device with 12 450 Gig 10k SAS Drives in it and we had 2 GBE2c switches in the c7000 for the interconnects.

One of the goals from the customer was to have complete failover for the networking as we will be running Virtual Servers on the 2008 Servers on the host machines the BL 480c’s. So with help from Jason one of our network guys and fellow blogger on this site we got the failover working. I have to admit I am not the greatest with networking so his help was much appreciated on this project. He has been in the process at this site of moving in a new core network switching using the HP Blade Switches is what I will call them but I think they are PROCURVE 5400ZL Switches.

How we ended up doing it was pretty simple as we took the GBE2 switches out and put HP passthrough modules in the c7000. When we would down one of the GBE2c switches the failover would not work as Jason thought the response of the switches was not fast enough. But we used HP Teaming on 2 of the NICs for the HyperV networking and we teamed the other 2 NICs for the SAN networking that would be handling the iSCSI traffic to the MSA. We had spread the MSA connections and the team connections across multiple switches on the HP Switch Blade. We had 2 Virtual Servers running on each Blade Server and when I downed the MSA Array Controller the servers keep working as the other Array picked the failed Array of the MSA on the fly and then Jason pulled a switch and everything just keep working because of the NIC Teaming. I know this in not detailed a lot but it was all pretty simple actually and not that complicated once you get to the end result. But it is working.

Til later just Roger