Comments on: Cisco UCS Networking Best Practices (in HD)

By: William Fleitz

William Fleitz — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 22:38:10 +0000

Brad, Excellent presentation. I have a quick question perhaps you or someone else can answer. My server team wants to connect a VMotion switch to the UCS so that we can Vmotion legacy VM servers to the UCS ESX farm. I’m wondering what is the best practice to accomplish this? It would need to be accessible across both 6100s. Thanks!

By: Praveen

Praveen — Mon, 16 May 2011 12:34:47 +0000

Hi ,

Awesome information!!!

I am designing a Network where we need to connect the 6120Xp Fabric extender to Catalyst 6509 . I found that we can connect the fabric Interconnect (FI) to 1G port of an uplink switch using The first 8 fixed ports can be configured to operate in 1 Gigabit Ethernet mode with the transceiver options specified for use with SFP-compatible ports using 1000BASE-T SFP GLC-

Since I have 2Nos 6509 Switches in the Datacentre I can connect only 4 Ports from 6120XP to each of 650. Can I configure channel from 6120Xp to 6509 between these 4 links?

Thanks and Regards
Praveen

By: Alex Wilkinson

Alex Wilkinson — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 11:51:23 +0000

Pure Gold! Thank you for providing this for the community!

-Alex

By: Brad Hedlund

Brad Hedlund — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 01:09:21 +0000

Brad,
To partition BW for iSCSI, you can keep UCS in End Host mode, use a LAN Pin Group and call it “iSCSI” or something. Pick the uplink you want dedicated for iSCSI traffic and put it in your iSCSI Pin Group. Take the vNICs used for iSCSI and assign them to the “iSCSI” LAN Pin Group.

-Brad

By: Brad Hedlund

Brad Hedlund — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:43:12 +0000

Leo,
No – static pinning will not work. The FI will still only pick one uplink as the broadcast listener. That’s the case for UCSM version 1.4 or older.

In the next release of UCSM, End Host Mode will be enhanced to support separate upstream L2 domains.

Cheers,
Brad

By: Leo

Leo — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 20:14:15 +0000

Hello,

one question regarding connecting a UCS to two or more L2 domains: To avoid switching the fabric interconnects to switch mode, would it be feasible / recommended to build several vPC Channels and pin the vNICS manually to these channels?

__Leo

By: Brad Hedlund

Brad Hedlund — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 03:48:24 +0000

Vijay,
The unknown dest MAC received from the server will be forwarded on the pinned uplink only. No flooding.
-Brad

By: VIJAY SHEKHAR

VIJAY SHEKHAR — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 03:13:42 +0000

Great work Brad!! really!

I have a question w.r.t Fabric Interconnect EHV Mode.
EHV mode does not learn MAC addresses on BI, It only learns MAC on SI.
now when server is sending a packet out of the POD to ethernet cloud, it will ARP and learn the MAC address of the nexy layer3 Hop, All good till here.
Now when the FI gets that Frame from server destined to L3 hop for that network it will be a Unlearnt MAC.
I also read that all Unlearnt MAC recieved on SI are Flooded to All other SI and Pinned BI.
If tha bove statement is true does FI flood traffic leaving the POD to ALL SI interfaces EVERYTIME?
It sounds too silly, but asking based on what I ave been reading.
Thanks!
Vijay Shekhar.

By: Brad Morgan

Brad Morgan — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 06:06:19 +0000

Brad,

What would the “best practice” recommendation be for a vmware deployment on UCS with redundant fiber interconnects connected to Nexus switches when the “SAN” connectivity is via iSCSI rather than FC. Would it be better to group the iSCSI vlan in with the other wan/lan traffic vlans so that it could share in the benefits present with vPC, or would it be best to set up the 6100s in switch mode to isolate the iSCSI vlan to protect it from broadcast storms or loops in the other vlans that might choke its bandwidth off. Is there a way to guarantee bandwidth to the iSCSI vlan to make sure that it won’t be adversely affected if an issue arises in one of the other vlans?

Your posts are exceptinally helpful.

Thank you

By: Brad Hedlund

Brad Hedlund — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 17:15:05 +0000

aiwa,
Yes – you can connect UCS to any standard 1GE or 10GE switch.
Nexus is a good choice for the 10GE density, performance, high availability, and vPC – as discussed in one of the videos.