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Connecting Blade to Network

I have inherited a system consisting of a Dell M1000e chassis, two M6348 switches and six M610 blades with six network interfaces in each. The problem is this: Each blade has two network cards communicating on the network through the internal ports on the switches. The rest of the cards are offline. How do I assign these network cards on the blades to internal ports on the switch? I have looked through all the documentation and it talks about how to use the advanced features, but I can't find anything that guides me though how to do a basic network hookup of the hardware.

If someone could point me in the right direction of where to look in the web interface, or even provide me a documentation link at what part of the documentation covers this, that would be great.

Thanks!

lanboyo

The M6348 switches should have a management cable, essentially the internal and external switch ports can be configured into various vlans or trunk ports to meet the needs of your server blades.

http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pwcnt/en/simple_switch_mode.pdf

is an overview, it takes a while to get comfortable with making changes to these beasts.

Essentially, if the upstream links (the physical ports on the outside of the switch cards) are in an up mode they will bring the interfaces on the server catds into an up mode as well. By default everything in the two agrregation groups are in the same vlans, and there is no ip configuration on the switch cards themselves. You will most likely want to set up an 802.3ag uplink from the external gig (or 10 gig) ports so that each group has link agregation for redundancy and speed. You can assign multiple vlans to the groups, making them trunk ports to the server blades internal interfaces so that you can assign vlans to virtual servers. All fun.

Brian B

ASKER

Here's what I found:

The first network port should be port 1 on the first switch, second is port 2 on the second switch. The third and fouth ports should be on port 17. That is the part that doesn't work.

According to Dell tech support I needed the latest firmware on the switches (3.1.2.8). Which I installed, but it doesn't seem to have helped. Will post back as I find more.

lanboyo

So port 17 is actually the first external port, ports 1-16 are all internal ports that correspond to the ethernet interfaces on the server blades.

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Brian B

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lanboyo

Yes the server cards currently see the internal ethernet ports on the two switch cards on fabric A, Ports 1-6 in your case. If you had full height server blades they would have two connections per switch card. To get more than two cards per port you need more switch cards and potentially mezzanine cards for the server blades.

If your host operating system allows for it, you can have guest operating systems on segragated networks using 802.1q vlans and configuring the ports as trunks.

http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/poweredge-blades-network-guide-en.pdf