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The end-to-end I/O connectivity, as shown in Figure 2, consists of multiple port channels and VLT configurations for LAN connectivity. Networking S4048-ON switches provide 10 GbE network connectivity between the compute cluster and the rest of the data center. According to Microsoft SQL Server 2016 best practices and Dell EMC infrastructure design principles, each application network is deployed as a separate workload VLAN that is defined in the data-center core network. All the workload VLANs are created as virtual network adapters on the converged virtual switch across all network connections. The Emulex LightPulse LPe31002 Fibre Channel adapters are used for Fibre Channel connectivity in the host operating system, and virtual Fibre Channel adapters are used for the virtual machines (VMs) that require in-guest Fibre Channel connectivity.
Figure 2. End-to-end I/O connectivity
Figure 3 shows the port assignments for Fibre Channel connectivity. Ports 4 and 5 are used to connect Dell EMC storage. The rest of the ports that are marked are used to connect the PowerEdge R740 servers.
Connect the cables of the dual-port Emulex LightPulse LPe31002 cards on the PowerEdge R740 server as follows:
Figure 3. Connectivity between server and Brocade switches
Unity 400 Hybrid Flash storage has two 16 Gb/s Fibre Channel ports from each controller for the front-end connectivity. Connect one port from each controller to switch 1 and connect the remaining port from each controller to switch 2.
Figure 4 and Figure 5 illustrate the connections between the storage and the switches.
Figure 4. Connections between Unity 400 Hybrid Flash storage and Brocade switches
Figure 5. Connectivity between Unity 400 Hybrid Flash storage and Brocade switches