Server1 in Bay1/9 will have ports G0/1 and G/09 in ICB1&2

Server2 in Bay2/10 will have ports G0/2 and G0/10 in ICB1&2

Server3 in Bay3/11 will have ports G0/3 and G0/11 in ICB1&2

....

You cant use therchannel, but your vm's will split across the nics in the vm vswitch. So you get 2 x 1Gb for your vm's. Not sure how esx balances across the nics, but they are assigned to a particular nic and therefore interconnect switch, so each vm will get a share of maximum 1Gb.

I used to run rack mount 4 cpu boxes with heaps more nics than two, and these were trunked. But that might have been overkill and I find the BL460 goes ok for bandwidth with only 2Gb and maybe 16 vm's max. I get about 10 vms typically per blade.

As I think was mentioned you can trunk out of each nortel into your other network infrastructure to give more bandwidth to the entire chassis.

If you run a lot of esx hosts in that chassis you will need this.

This basic config gives you link failure redundancy for your nics in your vswitch, but since the link is in the backplane its really only giving you redundancy for when an interconnect switch fails. Upstream path failures will not cause the vswitch to swap to the other nic, as I discovered recently.

If you want more redundancy it gets a little complicated. There are a few options

In one scenario you need to enable the crossbar between the switches (ports 17 and 18) and enable STP. Note this will mean you are only using the trunk from one of the interconnects to provide all your upstream bandwidth. If that trunk fails, STP will cut you over to the other trunk coming out of the other interconnect.

esx hosts connected to the interconnect switch with the inactive trunk will connect upstream via the crossbar to the interconnect with the active trunk.

In this scenario your trunk might need to be 3 or 4 ports to get the required bandwidth.

If you need more than 2 x 1Gb bandwidth for your esx host then you can use 10Gb ethernet I guess (flex10 option), but 2 x 10Gb is a lot of traffic for a 2 CPU blade and as mentioned your going to run out of memory or CPU before you run out of bandwidth.

Oh, there is a quad port card option but you need another two interconnect switches.

Theres a doco from HP on how to configure your network for redundancy, cant find it though.

But rather than me tell you read this doco (found it).

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/downloads/4AA1-0779ENW.pdf

In the examples they use cisco border switches (like you) with the GbE2c interconnect switch so just pick one of the topolgoes and follow the instructions.

We use HP Procurve but I figured it all out...

Chees