Wired Intelligent Edge

We have now 2 procurve 3500YL swtiches and want them to repclace then with procurve 3800 because default there is VRRP onboard. its handy for your core switches :) otherwise we have to buy it seperly for the 3500.Because the 3500 are already 5 or 6 years old we dont want to spend any money to them anymore and gone place them somewhere els in the organisation.

To increase the performance of the equallogic i know that you can enable jumbo frames  and flow control. I wonder if you can choose that certain vlan data Let say the vlan for ISCSI data get priority 1. And i also wonder if you can increase the port buffer size per port. So that i can give my 8 ports of the equallogic the most buffer.

last question, im also wondering what the default buffer size is on the 3800 i read sometihn avout 0768 Mb and 0256 MB for the 3500yl.

Hello,

The QOS options for these switches are pretty flexible.  You can assign a higher priority to a given VLAN, switchport, protocol, host, etc.  Check the advanced traffic management guide for the 3800s for this information.  You can also change your queues from the default of 8 to 4, which should give you more shared port buffer per port.  With that said, depending on the size of your network I would not recommend combining your iSCSI and core switches together.  It's best to just keep these separate. Here's a link to the guide.

http://bizsupport2.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c03724590/c03724590.pdf

Thank you

i will look at this document. We also decided today that we also place two extra procurve 3800 switches  only the ISCSI Traffic.

@Vince_Whirlwind

They told me that i have to buy this : HP J8993A ProCurve Switch 3500yl Premium Edge License

This will give support for VRRP. It will cost ~3350 -  4000 Dollar for 4 switches..

Hi,

A gigabit link is just a gigabit link, so these can be quite easily put to the limit by any ISCSI storage system. Do not expect to get major enhancements from the flow-control or buffers, it still will not get you past 1G. It only postpones the drop of packets (for some milliseconds), but then the drop will still occur.

If you are worried about the performance, make sure to add as many links into the link-agg (trunk) as possible, or consider the 10G option (if you did not buy them yet, make sure to order a version with the 10G ports for future use, the old 3500 could be equipped with a 10G module, the new 3800 must be purchased with the 10G ports onboard.

Since you will have dedicated 3800s for the ISCSI, consider configuring the entire switch to use only 2queues instead of the default 8, this will increase the available buffer for the 2 queues (1 queue is not possible).

This requires a reload of the switch, so better do this at install time.

Best regards,Peter

Please correct me if I am wrong, but I am under the impression that if you upgrade your 3500 firmware to K.15., you get VRRP support?