Thursday, October 23, 2008

HP ProCurve 5412zl and Equallogic PS5000E

So we finally got everything configured on the ProCurve 5412zl for the Equallogic today.  According to the documentation you need to configure the following:

  • a separate iScsi VLAN
  • turn on flowcontrol
  • enable jumbo frames on the VLAN
  • turn off spanning-tree on iScsi ports
  • disable unicast storm control

Here is the snippet of the switch config for the Equallogic and server connected to it:


interface C19  
   name "ESX Server connection to iScsi VLAN"
   flow-control
   no power-over-ethernet
exit
interface D9  
   name "Equallogic NIC1"
   flow-control
   no power-over-ethernet
exit
interface D10 
   name "Equallogic NIC2"
   flow-control
   no power-over-ethernet
exit

vlan 25
   name "iScsi_VLAN"
   untagged C19, D9-D10
   ip address 10.3.25.1 255.255.255.0
   jumbo
   exit

spanning-tree
spanning-tree C19 bpdu-filter
spanning-tree D9 bpdu-filter
spanning-tree D10 bpdu-filter

spanning-tree C19 admin-edge-port
spanning-tree D9 admin-edge-port
spanning-tree D10 admin-edge-port
spanning-tree config-name "Calamazo"
spanning-tree force-version RSTP-operation

On the ProCurve, I couldn't find a setting for unicast storm control.  If you know how to do this hit me up in the comments.

8 comments:

mormoon said...

Unicast stormcontrol??

I guess you are referring to broadcast storm-control.

On the interface level;
broadcast-limit [1-99]

where 1 is 1 percent.

You can control unicast with rate limiting however.

Rolfsa said...

Yeah...unicast storm control. I'm guessing it's some type of control that detects a large amount of "one to many" type instances like when a PC becomes a bot in a botnet or something. I've not seen a good description of what unicast storm control is, but it is mentioned in the setup doc.

Anonymous said...

Hi,

Did you purchase the Premium License for the 5412Zl to be able to use the Layer 3 routing?
We are looking at a similar setup.

Cheers Rich

Rolfsa said...

Yes we did. The switch has been working great. We finally went live with the site on January 5th. So far we've only had one issue and it was resolved by rebooting the switch. The isssue involved some VLAN traffic not correctly reaching destinations it should have had access to.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the quick reply Rolfsa Much appreciated.

Cheers Rich

Anonymous said...

Unicast storm control is disabled by default.

Rolfsa said...

mattias...I didn't run IOMeter when we did the install but we haven't noticed any performance issues. We are depoying an H ProCurve 8212zl next week with another Equallogic so I'll see if I can sneak in some performance testing then.

PassingStranger said...

any particular reason why your switched off Power over Ethernet? I know the EqualLogic doesn't need it but the switch shouldn't supply it if its not demanded by the device?