HP Flex-10 for Virtual Connect:

Using HP’s Virtual Connect switching modules for C-Class blades and either Flex-10 adapters or Lan-On-Motherboard (LOM) administrators can ‘partition the bandwidth of a single 10Gb pipeline into multiple “FlexNICs.” In addition, customers can regulate the bandwidth for each partition by setting it to a user-defined portion of the total 10Gb connection. Speed can be set from 100 Megabits per second to 10 Gigabits per second in 100 Megabit increments.)

This allows a single 10GE uplink to be presented to any operating system as 4 physical Network Interface Cards (NIC.)

FlexConnect

In order to perform this interface virtualization FlexConnect uses internal VLAN mappings for traffic segregation within the 10GE Flex-10 port (mid-plane blade chassis connection from the Virtual Connect Flex-10 10GbE interconnect module and the Flex-10 NIC device.)  Each FlexNIC can present one or more VLANs to the installed operating system.

Some of the advantages with this architecture are:

• A single 10GE link can be divided into 4 separate logical links each with a defined portion of the bandwidth.
• More interfaces can be presented from fewer physical adapters which is extremely advantageous within the limited space available on blade servers.

When the installed operating system is VMware this allows for 2x10GE links to be presented to VMware as 8x separate NICs and used for different purposes such as vMotion, Fault Tolerance (FT), Service Console, VM kernel and data.

The requirements for Flex-10 as described here are:

• HP C-Class blade chassis
• VC Flex-10 10GE interconnect module (HP blade switches)
• Flex-10 LOM and or Mezzanine cards