HP’s Flex-10 and VMware ESX(i) support

Recently a customer asked me if HP Flex-10 was fully supported for ESX(i) or not. For those that don’t know what Flex-10 is:

HP’s new Virtual Connect Flex-10 Ethernet module is the industry’s first interconnect that flexibly allocates the bandwidth of a 10 Gb Ethernet network port across four NIC connections. This eliminates the need for additional costly NICs, switches and cables while concurrently increasing bandwidth flexibility.

After checking the compatibility guide the answer was “Yes”. So what’s the point of mentioning it here? Well, although it was fully supported there is a mention in the KB about possible problems with HA and VMotion:

• VI Client does not show NIC connnection is down when the uplink to external switch is down
• VMware HA is not supported with ESXi 3.5 Update 3 (embedded and installable) hosts with uplinks connected to Flex-10 NICs.
• VMotion migration of virtual machine May time out with the default migration timeout value of 20
• ESX Server May fail to respond under the following configuration

I guess the tip of today: Always check the compatibility guide, but also check the KB cause problems like this might influence your implementation time, plan and even your design!