HP FlexFabric Virtual Switch 5900v Technology White Paper

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Application scenarios
The 5900v virtual switch provides granular control and management of traffic in virtualized environments,
such as data centers deployed with the VMware ESXi Enterprise Plus Edition. The VEPA forwarding and
traffic monitoring and management provided by the 5900v virtual switch enable you to implement
automatic deployment of a VM network.
To deploy a VM network:
• Install an EVB bridge (such as an HP 5900 switch) on top of a standard 42U server rack.
• Connect a rack or blade server that supports hardware-assisted virtualization (Intel VT or AMD-V)
to the EVB bridge through a standard Ethernet network cable. Connect the EVB bridge to an
aggregation switch or core switch in the network through a copper cable or an optical fiber.
• Install the VMware vSphere 5.0 or later version on each EVB station, and manage EVB stations as
a cluster, so they can share the iSCSI or FC storage.
• Deploy the virtualized management platform VMware vCenter Server, distributed vSwitch controller
5900v virtual switch VCE, and network management platform IMC VCE in the management center.
Figure 11 5900v virtual switch network topology
Management
center
Server access
HP 5900
HP iMC VCM
OS
Service system
OS
Service system
OS
Service system
• VM network control
through ACLs, QoS,
Netstream, and mirroring
Storage access
HP 5900
Core
HP 12500
iSCSI storage array
HP P4500
Internet
Internet access
Network administrator
Server administrator
VMware vCenter Server
5900v virtual switch
plug-in
5900v virtual switch
VCE
• Unified management of
server virtualization
• Port group configuration
management
• VDP negotiation
• OpenFlow flow
entry control
• Hardware virtualization
• OpenFlow traffic
forwarding
As shown in Figure 11, the traffic control and management process by the 5900v virtual switch is as
follows:
1. The server administrator logs in to the virtualized management platform VMware vCenter Server
(the network must be reachable).
2. The server administrator manages and monitors the data center infrastructure (including cluster
management, creation, deletion, startup, shutdown, clone, or migration for a VM) and port group
configuration management.
3. The network administrator does the following:
{ Creates VSI type and network policy resources on IMC VCM.