FC with Synergy 3820C 10/20Gb CNA and VMware ESXi

(This post is intentionally brief because I don’t want to sidetrack by talking more on the things I link to. I am trying to clear my browser tabs by making blog posts on what’s open, so I want to focus on just getting stuff posted. :)

At work we are moving HPE Synergy now. We have two Synergy 12000 frames with each frame containing a Virtual Connect SE 40Gb F8 Module for Synergy. The two frames are linked via Synergy 20Gb Interconnect Link Module(s). (Synergy has a master/ satellite module for the Virtual Connect modules so you don’t need a Virtual Connect module per frame (or enclosure as it used to be in the past)). The frames have SY 480 Gen 10 compute modules, running ESXi 6.5, and the mezzanine slot of each compute module has a Synergy 3820C 10/20Gb CNA module. The OS in the compute modules should see up to 4 FlexNIC or FlexHBA adapters per Virtual Connect module.

The FlexHBA adapters are actually FCoE adapters (they provide FCoE and/ or iSCSI actually). By default these FlexHBA adapters are not listed as storage adapters in ESXi so one has to follow the instructions in this link. Basically:

1) Determine the vmnic IDs of the FCoE adapters:

2) Then do a discovery to activate FCoE:

As a reference to my future self, here’s a blog post on how to do this automatically for stateless installs.

Totally unrelated to the above, but something I had found while Googling on this issue: Implementing Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation Groups (MC-LAG) with HPE Synergy Virtual Connect SE 40Gb F8 Module and Arista 7050 Series Switches. A good read.

Also, two good blog posts on Synergy: