HP StoreOnce B6200 Installation Planning and Preparation Guide (EJ022-90995, November 2013)

VIF addresses
• The VIF addresses are key to ensuring continued performance and availability in the event of
failover and are assigned as part of the network configuration process.
• There are two instances of VIF addresses: the Management Console VIF and Data Path VIFs.
• The B6000 Management Console uses the Management VIF address to access the Backup
System from the customer’s network for all manageability tasks. Because this Management
VIF address is dynamic on the system, it can be active on the master node and passive on the
other nodes, but should the master node fail for any reason the Virtual Management Console
simply moves to another node and can still be accessed using the same VIF address.
• The VIF Data Path address is associated to a service set, which is the set of services (VTL, NAS,
Catalyst, replication and so on), available for a node. Should the physical port fail, data will
automatically be processed by the service set associated with the failover port using the VIF
Data Path address. No change is needed to the VIF address of the service set, allowing hosts
and the B6000 Backup System to function correctly. Each couplet has two nodes and, therefore,
two service sets, which means that each couplet has two Data Path VIFs.
IMPORTANT: The VIF addresses are the IP addresses that you, the customer, need to know to
access the B6000 Management Console (the management VIF), and to configure Catalyst and
NAS backup targets, VTL and NAS replication configurations and Catalyst copy jobs (the data
path VIFs). You will not know what these addresses are until the HP service engineer has configured
the network for you. The HP service engineer will leave you with a record of these addresses after
installation and you can also use the CLI (command line interface) to display them.
NOTE: The number of IP addresses required varies according to the template selected, as does
the number of physical ports required. These numbers are not identical. Please check the tables in
Recommended versus required IP addresses (page 19) and Number of physical ports for each
template (page 21) to ensure that you have allocated sufficient for your networking requirements.
Supported network configurations (templates)
Network ports are bonded to ensure high availability. (But there is no network bonding between
1Gb and 10Gb ports.)
The optimum configuration is to use the 10GbE ports for data (NAS shares and Catalyst stores)
and all replication traffic, and the 1GbE ports for the B6000 Management Console. However, this
requires two sub-nets and may not be available to all users.
Five network configurations are supported and configured using one of the supplied network
templates, illustrated on the following pages. You must decide which template you intend to use
prior to installation.
Supported network bonding modes
Bonding modes are critical to any network configuration, so please be careful and take extra care
choosing which network bonding mode is the best choice for you connection. The five network
configurations each have default bonding modes, which may be re-configured at installation by
the HP Support specialist.
Three bonding modes are supported:
• Mode 1 (Active/Backup)
This is the most simple bonding mode; it allows network traffic via one active port only and
requires no specific extra switch configuration. It is recommended for simple network
14 Connecting to your network