IBM Bladecenter switches

[cowetacoit]

Our Server admin and i have been trying to figure something out. We currently have a IBM H series bladecenter with 6 bladeservers that have two NICs. We have two of the CIGSM switches in the chassis. Each server NIC connects to the two switches individually. We're looking to add two additional NICs using the Ethernet Expansion Card for bladeservers. If i add two more NICs (4 total) will i need 4 of the CIGSM switches in the chassis? One switch to every NIC? I know this more of an IBM question but we can't seem to find any answers to this.

[Reza Sharifi]

Michael,

By default each IBM blade comes with 2 NICS and if you want to have 4 NICs in each blade, then you need to add an expantion card to each IBM blade. This way you will get 4 NICs and you can etherchannel all of them together. we have this exact configuration in our data center

HTH

Reza

[cowetacoit]

but each NIC connects directly to a seperate Cisco switch. How can you configure an etherchannel on a bladesever that connects several seperate switches?

[Reza Sharifi]

yes, even with each NIC connecting to a seperate Cisco 3110x, you can still etherchannel them together using LACP.

[cowetacoit]

I'd like to bring this topic back up again. We've decided to move forward with purchasing an additional 6 Cisco 3012s

in addition to the 2 we currently have, so a total of 8 3012s. That means all 8 of our Bladeservers willl

have 8 NICs as well. You said I could configure an etherchannel on the 3012s using LACP. We are running vSphere 4 on our chassis. Could you give me some more details on the design with VM Ware involved? Right now we have 2 NICs per bladeserver w/ 2 3012s. in VM Ware, each NIC/Uplink is configured in Active/Standby mode. How would we configure this for Active/Active?

[cowetacoit]

Could someone elaborate on this a little more? I can't find any information ANYWHERE about having active/active NICs in vmware on a IBM BC with cisco 3012s. We have now installed 8 nics per bladeserver and 8 cisco 3012s in our BC. Each pair of NICs/switches are configured for Active/Standby. To my knowledge you can't team them because you can't have the same ether channel going to two seperate switches. Can someonme confirm?

[Reza Sharifi]

Are your 3012 switches stacked?

[cowetacoit]

no, they are not stacked.

[Reza Sharifi · Accepted solution]

If you need to connect multiple NICs from your servers to the 3100 switches and create a portchannel and have redundancy, then you need to stack them so they all look like one switch logically.  I do this with IBM chassis and 3110 switches.

HTH

Reza