Hello, my name is Curt. I'm a senior principal engineer working with the Dell GSE Support Team. This video is demonstrating how to configure a QLogic network adapter as defined in the Dell Microsoft Scalable Hyper Converged Infrastructure, HCI, Solutions Deployment Guide.
We'll quickly discuss the key settings to ensure the adapter is configured correctly allowing RDMA network connectivity for a stable HCI Storage Spaces Direct storage network. We'll be looking to explore the settings for the QLogic FastLinQ 41262 network adapter. This configuration usually occurs before the Cluster Node OS has been installed. The NICs comprise the storage network element for the Microsoft HCI solution on Dell AX ready nodes.
While the QLogic FastLinQ 41262 adapter on AX nodes can use either the RoCE or iWARP network protocol, Dell EMC is only validated using iWARP with this adapter for their hyper-converged Azure stack solution. We'll review the necessary settings for RDMA, DCBX and iWARP. The information in this video can be found on page 14 of the Microsoft HCI solutions from Dell Technologies deployment guide.
So to begin our demo we're using an iDRAC console session to access the server system BIOS. I use the keyboard F2 option to get into the System Setup of our HCI cluster node. Next we select the 'Device Settings'. On the Device Settings interface we see all the available network adapters on our server. We have three different QLogic adapters on the server, and the ones we want to use and configure for our Storage Spaces Direct storage network are the QLogic 25 Gigabit connections, found in slot 4, at ports 1 and 2.
This is a dual port card, and we'll need to eventually configure both these port connections to complete the overall configuration. We'll start with slot four, port one. Select that. On the main Configuration page we want to go to 'Device Level Configuration' and we want to make sure the 'Virtualization Mode' is set to 'None'. After doing that we click 'Back'.
Next we want to select 'NIC Configuration'. For 'Link Speed' we want to make sure that 'SmartAN' is selected. For 'NIC + RDMA Mode' we want to make sure that's 'Enabled'. 'RDMA Operational Mode' should be set to 'iWARP'. 'Boot Protocol' should be set to 'None'. 'Virtual LAN Mode should be set to 'Disabled', and we should see a 'Virtual LAN ID' of '1'. Okay, let's click 'Back' again. For the 'Data Center Bridging' settings we go ahead and click into that. We want to make sure that the 'DCBX Protocol' is set to 'Disabled' in this particular case.
And we go 'Back', click 'Finish'. Now at this point we want to make sure that all the settings that we set for port 1 are set also for port 2. After you've completed making those settings you will have enabled RDMA, iWARP and set the correct DCBX settings for the QLogic NOC being used in a Dell HCI Solution configuration. That concludes our demo on configuring QLogic network adapters for Dell Hybrid Converged Infrastructure Deployments.
Thank you for watching.
