Comments on: Cisco UCS and Nexus 1000V design diagram with Palo adapter

By: Brad Hedlund

Brad Hedlund — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 14:47:25 +0000

IPK,
With design #2 (VN-Link in HW) you can have the Palo adapter provide 54 dynamic vNIC’s per host, and therefore 54 virtual machines per host. Should be no problem with your 10:1 consolidation ratio.
As far as extending this across multiple B-Series blades, the Fabric Interconnect is acting as a vDS from the perspective of vCenter and therefore has the same configuration maximums as a normal software based vDS. According to the new vSphere 4.1 Configuration Maximums Guide you can have 350 hosts in one vDS. http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_config_max.pdf

Having said that, the theoretical maximum number of blades under the auspices of a Fabric Interconnect cluster is 320. The current supported number of chassis in one cluster is (14), so the actual maximum as of today would be 112 blades in one HW VN-Link DVS.
For HA/DRS clusters the VMware maximum is still 32 hosts.

Cheers,
Brad

By: IPK

IPK — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 03:57:09 +0000

Hi Brad,
Just a simple query from a design perspective. I want to compare the following designs;

1) Nexus 1000v with Palo adapter [VN-Link in SW]
2) Palo adapter with Passthru switching with FI acting as the vDS [VN-Link in HW]

in a VMware virtualization environment where there is 10:1 VM density across three B-Series HH blades. Workloads are fairly I/O intensive hence I preferred the second approach. Any limitation in terms of extending this design across B-Series blade systems?

IPK

By: Brad Hedlund

Brad Hedlund — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 00:50:59 +0000

James,
Nexus 1000V “MAC Pinning” is the mode that is easiest to configure and “just works”. VPC-HM is the mode that allows for more granular control of steering certain traffic types out of the NICs you want. If you’re not too picky about that, I would recommend MAC Pinning.

Cheers,
Brad

By: James S

James S — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 22:20:08 +0000

Great article !

Should we use VPC-HM with mac-pinning instead of subgroup cdp ?

By: push bhatkoti

push bhatkoti — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 03:40:22 +0000

Great article. It ahs cleared up my mystery!

-Push

By: VMAdmin

VMAdmin — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:01:58 +0000

This is brillient and a new stuff to me.

Really amazing

By: Jonathan Butz

Jonathan Butz — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 20:01:50 +0000

I see that you have separate uplinks, system-uplink and vm-uplink, which then require dedicated physical links on the host. This is what the Cisco docs recommend.

I have found that it is not necessary to do this and have provisioned Nexus1000v infrastructure with a single uplink profile that attaches to all of the host physical nics.

What is Cisco’s perspective on a single uplink?
If I am building hosts with two 10Gb nics, it seems so silly to dedicate one to management traffic…

By: Brad Hedlund

Brad Hedlund — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:12:04 +0000

Scott,

Jumbo frames can easily be enabled on the Fabric Interconnect and with that can certainly only help iSCSI and vMotion performance, for example.
The Palo adapter does TCP segmentation offloading but does not do any special HW offloading for iSCSI specific payloads, nor does it support iSCSI booting.

By: Brad Hedlund

Brad Hedlund — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:06:44 +0000

Josh,

This design diagram works with the 6100 in End-Host mode, or switching mode. Nothing in this diagram requires the use of switching mode on the 6100 Fabric Interconnects.

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