I decided to try the HP ProCurve Switch Mesh technology in conjunction with my HP BladeSystems and HP Virtual Connect. After a week of planing, searching the Internet and reading several documents, I started to rebuild the network in my home lab. The results are amazing. Everything in my lab runs very fast and with low latency. Even the software based Core Router (Debian + Quagga) is no limitation. I tested the network performance with iperf and was able to send data thru my Mesh from one routed network to a another with 900 Mbits/s! I did the iperf test with two CentOS 6 virtual machine running one VMXNET3 NIC. The VMs are placed on different hosts, too.
Configuring the switch mesh is very simple. Disable routing and stacking and add all mesh ports with the mesh command. The vlans are added automatically to all mesh ports. Only ensure that every mesh switch knows all configured vlans.
My HP BladeSystem is connected with two LACP trunks to the switch mesh. I decided to setup VLAN tunneling because the two connected blades running VMware ESX.The HP Virtual Connect setup was very simple and thanks to LLDP I detected a cabling error. 
LLDP is very useful! You can see several informations about the connected network port. That’s really cool.
Currently my mesh is connected with several 1 Gbits links, but with a little bit luck I can get some 10 GbE modules for my 3500yl switches.
That’s all for today. Stay tuned.
To solve the error
# ./install
-bash: ./install: /lib/ld-linux.so.2: bad ELF interpreter: No such file or directory
and the font display error when IBM Installation Manager is started, you need to install following packages with yum.
yum install gtk2.i686 libXtst.i686 dejavu-sans-fonts
Wooow… lot’s of changes ! Today I downloaded the brand new Oracle Solaris 11 operating system and started to install it into a VirtualBox virtual machine. Automatic network configuration is a very nice feature, but I’m a “Old-School” guy and I prefer the manual configuration. So I tried to setup a valid network configuration for IPv4 and IPv6. I’m running several months a dual-stack configuration at home and I’m very impressed of IPv6. That’s why a proper IPv6 configuration is very important for me, because I access all my systems over IPv6 if it’s available.
Okay, no guarantee for all following steps. But my Solaris 11 installation seems to run well with this configuration. If I did some errors, please comment. Solaris 11 has lot’s of changes!
Disable automatic network configuration:
# netadm enable -p ncp DefaultFixed
Configure a static IPv4 address and default route:
# ipadm create-ip net0
# ipadm create-addr -T static -a 10.0.2.18/24 net0/v4static
# route -p add default 192.168.100.1
Setup name services and a valid domain name:
# svccfg
svc:> select name-service/switch
svc:/system/name-service/switch> setprop config/host = astring: "files dns"
svc:/system/name-service/switch> setprop config/ipnodes = astring: "files dns"
svc:/system/name-service/switch> select name-service/switch:default
svc:/system/name-service/switch:default> refresh
svc:/system/name-service/switch:default> validate
# svccfg
svc:> select nis/domain
svc:/network/nis/domain> setprop config/domainname = "itdg.nbg"
svc:/network/nis/domain> select nis/domain:default
svc:/network/nis/domain:default> refresh
svc:/network/nis/domain:default> validate
# svccfg
svc:> select dns/client
svc:/network/dns/client> setprop config/nameserver=net_address: ( 2001:4dd0:fd4e:ff01::1 2001:4dd0:fd4e:ff02::1 )
svc:/network/dns/client> select dns/client:default
svc:/network/dns/client:default> refresh
svc:/network/dns/client:default> validate
svc:/network/dns/client:default> exit
# svcadm enable dns/client
Please note, that I configured IPv6 name server addresses! This is only possible if your DNS server has a valid IPv6 configuration.
Let’s add the important IPv6 part:
# ipadm create-addr -T addrconf net0/v6
# ipadm create-addr -T static -a 2001:4dd0:fd4e:d00f::a007 net0/v6add
The first line is needed because I don’t want to configure an IPv6 default route! This is done with my Router Advertisement daemon and Link-Local addresses.
That’s it ! My Solaris 11 installation is available thru IPv4 and IPv6. 
