ACI and IBM/ Brocade blade switches integration possibilities

[faizal_vi]

Hi,

we have few blade centers with ibm and brocade switches in our DC. There are a number of applications running in all these servers. Most of the applications are windows based.

moving to aci what are possibilities of incorporating these servers inside these blade center with aci infrastructure.

the traditional network is currently connected to the blade switches in L2 trunks carrying multiple vlans. 

[Claudia de Luna]

Hi @faizal_vi,

Remember that at the end of the day ACI is still just a network (with some great features to be sure).  You can configure trunks with multiple vlans down to your servers and or switches.  I've integrated IBMs into ACI before and don't recall any issues other than to make sure you understand how you want to connect them up (LACP, no LACP, individual L2 trunks, etc.).  Not knowing the specifics of what you have, can the server chassis support the network connections directly or do you want to keep the Brocades?  Either way, ACI can replicate your L2 trunks and vlan configuration.   Think about how you want to integrate them into the fabric and if you can share a sketch of what you would like to see, we can provide more details.

Claudia

[faizal_vi]

Hi Claudia,

My current design is that i have lacp connection to both blade switches in the blade center from current core switches . Servers inside is connected to the blade switch. I am not sure of the number of connections the servers has to each blade.
I am trying to find the model of blade switches from the system team.
I understand that we can have L2 extension untill the blade switch using ACI. What are the possibilities of extending the epgs until the blade servers inside like how we do for vmm integration where in we move the vm to the aci created epgs/ port groups.

Regards,

Faizal

[Claudia de Luna]

Hi @faizal_vi ,

If you want to extend the fabric down into the virtual environment, take a look at ACI Virtual Edge (AVE).  I think that might be what you are looking for...I thought that might be what you were asking...sorry I got that wrong!

Cisco ACI Virtual Edge Installation Guide, Release 3.0(x)

[faizal_vi]

HI,

I understand that Cisco AVE is used along with V Center. It is Hyper-V Clusters in my scenario. My issue is our blade environment some of the blade servers are Hyper V servers and some are standalone servers. I understand there is a challenge in this extending the EPG for these standalone servers. As mentioned earlier , our setup is IBM blades.