Emulex VMWARE LP21000 - Manual (Page 14)

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Configuring the LP21000 for NIC Teaming in ESX
NIC teaming occurs when multiple uplink adapters are associated with a single vSwitch to form a team. A
team can share the load of traffic between physical and virtual networks or provide passive failover in the
event of a hardware failure or network outage. Figure 14 shows the configuration of two vSwitches within
an ESX server. The service console traffic is assigned to a vSwitch that in turn is connected to a 100 Mbps
NIC. The second vSwitch provides networking for the VMkernel service and for a virtual machine. On the
uplink, the vSwitch is connected to two LP21000 CNAs which provides redundancy through NIC teaming.
Figure 14: A network configuration where a vSwitch is uplinked with two CNAs for NIC teaming
Scaling to Enterprise Manageability
As FCoE-based convergence makes its way into enterprise data centers, one of the key requirements is the
ability to manage both the FCoE and Fibre Channel SAN infrastructure without increasing the overall
management complexity. Emulex provides software applications that streamline deployment, simplify
management and virtualization as well as provide multipathing capabilities in mission critical environments.
Emulex HBAnyware is a unified management platform for Emulex LightPulse Fibre Channel HBAs and FCoE
CNAs. It provides a centralized console to manage Emulex HBAs and CNAs on local and remote hosts.
Some new features of HBAnyware 4.0 include -