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RTM

Well-Known Member
Jan 26, 2014
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Since you have connected everything in a ring, your problem might be broadcast storms.

You could do something like this instead to avoid it:
A-> B & C
B-> A & D
 

whitey

Moderator
Jun 30, 2014
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I attempted this w/ a 3 node vSphere cluster and direct attached X540-T2's and had a helluva time getting everything to work right (vmotion, svmotion, random NFS disconnects/mounting/vmkpinging issues...it was absured). Guess what was the EASY fix, get a switch involved :-D

Sorry not much help but I am fairly handy in both the networking and virtualization world and hell if I could make this sing. 4 Hosts direct connect/attached and all hosts playing nice networking wise is gonna be tough. Maybe RTM's response is possible but if I were a betting man your gonna invest more than it's worth ('is the juice worth the squeeze' if you know what I mean?).

I have no doubt that a 2 node direct connect setup would probably work very well and in theory I thought a 3 node vSphere direct conn 10G base-T setup was gonna be pretty simple/straightforward (and I tried all sorts of shinanigans of tagging/untagging vSwitch port group/phys switch/native vlan/VMware 4095 pass all vlan's trick, promisc/mac forge/vDS trickery, etc...tons of other stuff) but I soon learned a hard lesson and swapped out my X540-T2's for 520's and DAC cables/switch upgrade. Everything was DEAD simple after I got a switch involved which I just knew was gonna be the case.

Good luck, let us know if you get it to all play nice.
 

firenity

Member
Jun 29, 2014
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I suppose another option would be to run two of the Brocade CNAs per server (i.e. 4x 10 GbE ports total per server), since they're so cheap. C6100 nodes only have one PCIe expansion slot though (and 1 mezz?), right?
 

firenity

Member
Jun 29, 2014
51
8
8
I was merely trying to say it would be another possibility in general (not for the C6100 however, since it doesn't have enough PCIe expansion slots).

Although you could get the "official" Dell 10GbE mezzanine cards and run 1x Brocade NIC + 1x Dell NIC per node.
Unfortunately they're not as cheap as the Brocades - $ 125 according to a quick eBay search.