A leading architectural firm decides to build a redundant vSphere 5.1 Infrastructure cluster with HP BladeSystem. As their consultant, you propose redundant HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosures, Flex Fabri

2 is just the count of Flex-Fabric LOM cards installed in the server, not the total adapter count after virtual port expansion.

4 represents only the raw physical port count (2 LOMs x 2 ports each) and ignores the virtual adapter multiplication provided by the Flex-Fabric interconnect modules.

8 would imply only 2 virtual adapters per physical port, which underrepresents the 4-virtual-connections-per-port capability of the Flex-Fabric architecture.

The BL660c Gen8 with two dual-port Flex-Fabric LOMs provides 4 physical mezzanine ports connecting to the HP Virtual Connect Flex-Fabric modules. The Flex-Fabric architecture allows each physical port to present up to 4 independent virtual connections (Ethernet or FCoE) to the server OS, yielding 4 physical ports x 4 virtual adapters = 16 configurable Ethernet adapters visible to ESX per blade node. This virtual port multiplication is the core function of the Flex-Fabric interconnect design.