HP Ships Virtual Connect I/O for Blades, Adds Blade Workstation

Published: March 6, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back in June 2006, when Hewlett-Packard launched its third generation, c-Class BladeSystem blade server chassis and related blade servers, one of the interesting features of the new box was a gadget called Virtual Connect. While the c-Class machines started shipping last July, Virtual Connect, which virtualized links between blade servers and their connections to Ethernet networks and storage area networks, is only available starting last week.

According to Bill Dicke, international strategy manager for the BladeSystem product line at HP, the Virtual Connect modules in the new c-Class boxes are one of the reasons why the new machines are so popular. More than 100 customers have been testing the devices before they shipped this week, and Dicke says that a number of them have decided to standardize on c-Class blade servers just because of this feature, which greatly simplifies the task of managing network and SAN connectivity for blades.

Like many technologies at HP, the Virtual Connect features of the c-Class blades is derived from technology developed for the NonStop fault tolerant server line from the formerly independent Tandem Computers, which was acquired by Compaq in 1996. The Virtual Connect modules, which are available for Ethernet links and Fibre Channel links right now, do exactly what the name suggests: they virtualize this I/O. The idea is to wire servers, networks, and SANs once physically and then rewire virtually, using software inside the Virtual Connect module, from that point forward.

According to Dicke, the Virtual Connect modules solve a pesky problem that has inhibited the adoption of blade servers. One of the main benefits of blade servers is that, thanks to the midplane and integrated switches in a blade server chassis, they significantly cut down on the spaghetti of wires in a normal server setup. This is all well and good. But the problem is that while this makes the life of a server administrator easier, it actually makes the lives of the network admin and the storage manager worse. Each blade chassis has a relatively small switch in it for linking to Ethernet networks or Fibre Channel SANs, which means network and storage administrators have to manage a larger number of devices in a bladed setup. This is not a popular idea, and what network and SAN managers want to do is link blade servers to very large central switches outside of the chassis.

The Virtual Connect device does this, and it does one more important thing that makes it exceedingly useful. Each Ethernet card on a network has what is called a MAC address and each SAN host bus adapter has something called a worldwide ID or worldwide name. In each case, these identifiers provide a unique address on the Ethernet or Fibre Channel network for the devices that they attach to. In any server setup, if you want to change an Ethernet link or an HBA connect, you have to not only change the cards around, but you have to configure the network or SAN to know that the server is linked through a specific MAC address or worldwide ID to talk to specific network switches or SANs. This is a big pain in the neck and is the cause of many meetings.

With Virtual Connect, the MAC addresses and worldwide IDs are virtualized inside the module, and so are the links back to the server blades on the other side. What this means is that once a module has been set up to link to a particular Ethernet network or SAN, it stays that way, no matter what you do to the blade servers behind it. And if you want to plug a new blade into a particular network or SAN, you just plug it into the other side of the Virtual Connect module.

"Now you can add or change servers, but the network and storage guys won't see any change," says Dicke. Conversely, networks and SANs can change, and as long as they are feeding data back into the Virtual Connect box, the blade servers are none the wiser. HP claims that Virtual Connect can increase the productivity of administrators by a factor of three because of this flexibility.

The Virtual Connect Ethernet module has eight Gigbit Ethernet uplinks and two 10 Gigabit Ethernet CX-4 uplinks; the device supports VLAN tagging and port aggregation. It has Gigabit Ethernet downlinks back to the c-Class blade servers, and presumably this will be upgraded over time to faster 10 Gigabit Ethernet downlinks, as the market demands this. The module has a total of 16 downlinks, one for each blade in the c-Class chassis. Up to six of these devices can be added to a single chassis for customers who have complex networking needs. The Virtual Connect Ethernet module costs $5,699.

The Virtual Connect Fibre Channel module links to SANs, and it has four auto-negotiating Fibre Channel uplinks and 16 downlinks, all running at 4 Gbit/sec. The HBA port aggregation used in the device adheres to an existing standard called the T11 N-Port ID Virtualization standard. Up to four of these can be housed in a single c-Class chassis. It costs $9,499.

Finally, HP has also announced a new c-Class blade that is aimed at virtualized workstation environments instead of servers. The new xw460c blade workstation has one or two dual-core "Woodcrest" Xeon 5100 processors--not the higher-performance "Clovertown" quad-core Xeons. Architecturally, this latter chip, which is more desirable, will plug into the blade, so pester HP about that. Anyway, customers can choose Woodcrest chips running at 1.6 GHz, 1.86 GHz, 2.33 GHz, and 2.66 GHz. The blade workstation supports up to 32 GB of main memory using 4 GB DIMMs (which is a bit pricey, so 16 GB is the practical maximum) and has an embedded nVidia Quadro FX540M graphics chip with 128 MB of graphics memory; the graphics chip can drive up to four monitors, which is what a lot of financial services customers who are looking at blade PCs and workstations need. The blade has HP's home-grown remote graphics software, which allows it to drive a monitor that is located far from the workstation blade.

The xw460c blade workstation supports Microsoft's Windows XP Professional, Blade PC edition, with Service Pack 2. It does not yet support the new Windows Vista or Linux. The base blade workstation with a single processor and 2 GB of memory costs $4,329.

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