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

By: Shashidhar Patil

Shashidhar Patil — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:41:44 +0000

Hi Brad,
I do not see that failure cases of Fabric explained. If Fabric A fails
all vNIC0 generated traffic is disrupted ? Can a VM use one port each from vNIC0 and vNIC1 for
redundancy and team those ports ?

By: Brad Hedlund

Brad Hedlund — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 23:39:07 +0000

Eddie,
In switch mode there should be no issue. Just connect your DMZ switches to the 6100s, pick the VLANs within UCS that will be the DMZ VLANs, and make sure only those VLANs are forwarding on the links connecting to the DMZ.

By: Eddie Wieder

Eddie Wieder — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 21:27:42 +0000

Our UCS is version 2.0w and is configured for switched mode. We have a 3750x Stack with 10GB uplink ports configured in Port Channel with two 6100′s. We now need to connect our Two DMZ’s to our UCS but keep the traffic separated, if possible. We are currently running VMWare for all of our 4 server hosts. My question is based on Video 6. I am unsure on how to do this correctly as it seems to keep bridging/broadcasting each sides networks. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

By: Marwan

Marwan — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 11:24:35 +0000

Hi Brad,
i know its a late comments or question but just wondering about best practice UCS/N1K networking
where cisco Docs recomend to use LACP port channel with clustered upstream switches (vPC,VSS)
and vpc_HM with non-clustered switches with mac-pining
the question here
if we present one vNIC to the ESX host and N1K and in UCS this vNIC has failover enabled from FIA to FIB
and in the back end this vNIC has the UCS port-channel to the physical switch
why we need to worry about port channelling if its already will be done by UCS and the esxi host and N1K will see one uplink/vNIC???
( understood with palo we can vitalize these vNICs without enabling fail over to send traffic selectively over certain ports if required ! )

Thanks

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