Looking to get our first blade solution.
One of the solutions we're looking for, is a blade enclosure with converged switches in it. The HP solution suggested to us meeting this convergence was for a BLc7000 with a pair of FlexFabric 20/40 F8 switches in it. The blades themselves would then have a 2 port 20Gb adapter.
Just wondering what people's thoughts are on only having a single dual port adapter... good? Bad? I would lean toward bad, myself. But I've never implemented something like this so it's just a gut reaction (more is better kind of thing). I know with 1GbE connections you definitely want resilience... but... is that even needed with this setup? I recognize that the single adapter is a single point of hardware failure, but I'm more referring to day-to-day operation. In this case I'd likely arrange the adapters all on a single vswitch, active/active if possible (I'll need to look deeper and see if the switches stack), with all VMkernel ports on the same vSwitch as the VM traffic. That seems like it would be a poor practice.
To give you an idea of where we're coming from, we are replacing rack servers with six 1GbE NICs and four 8Gb HBAs each (3 dual port NICs and 2 dual port HBAs). It will be quite the jump in Ethernet performance (Storage array will be the bottleneck... for now..).