Forum Discussion
Josh_41258
Nimbostratus
I plan on having the switch interfaces configured and ready to be plugged in. They just won't be plugged in IMMEDIATELY as the blade is inserted.. perhaps 30-60seconds later. I just want to make sure there the blade won't try to start processing traffic before I can get the interfaces cabled.
@Josh - thanks for the detailed response! Ours are cabled directly to Nexus 7k's. I typically have 4x10GB for each blade (2x10 for the internal side, 2x10 for the external). Each blade also has a switchport on the "sync" or "ha" VLAN that is used for sync and network failover traffic. I don't typically interconnect individual blades together.
Thanks,
Josh
Sep 18, 2013
That sounds solid. Are you splitting trunks on different line cards with VPC?
Blades can connect to other blades through the chassis. To my knowledge you do not need to cable every blade to the network in order to gain their compute power, but you end up with SPOFs in certain failure scenarios.
Also, you can setup trunks across slots, so you can have trunk INTERNAL running on 1/1.1 and 2/1.1 and trunk EXTERNAL on 1/1.2 and 2/1.2, and so on. This mode works great for ours, allowing us to "yield" blades for downtime. Be very careful to always yield the blade during downtime as you can otherwise end up with a traffic interruption.
I found that when removing a slot 2 blade without any guests, it was still handling traffic for guests on the other blade, likely due to how LACP had organized my links.