Cisco Nexus 5548UP - Enhanced vPC

[bunce.jake]

Hello,

We will be deploying a new Cisco Nexus 5K environment with 2248 FEX's.

The firewall in the environment (non-Cisco), only supports static Port-channels - i.e "ON" configuration and not LACP.

For redundancy we will be patching it into the environment in a topology where VLAN's are trunked and connected to two FEX modules as on page 2 of this document:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/datacenter/nexus5000/sw/mkt_ops_guides/513_n1_1/n5k_enhanced_vpc.pdf

Every example I've seen online uses LACP instead of a static Port-channel. My questions are:

Will this cause any issues in the event of port failure?

Is this best practice?

Are there any "gotchas" or caveats with this design?

Many thanks in advance.

Jacob

[Colby Beam]

I always like to use LACP where and when I can. Some devices, like your firewall and vmware do not support LACP. As long as both devices are configured correctly and using mode-on, there should be no issues with this. I do not like mode-on for this reason, as it does not negotiate anything before bringing up the port-channel. Therefore just confirm it is configured as mode-on on both sides and you should be fine. This should not cause any disruption if one link fails, but I would test the configuration before putting this into production.

[mikemu]

Jacob,

As Colby noted many folks are using "on" within there topologies for a setup just like yours. It will work just fine..

[bigloudeltoro]

You guys sure about this? I am trying to use a UCS-C210-M2 right now with VMWare 5.X and my port channel is not sending traffic. My VMs are not trasmitting data and my port channels are up. I think I may need to take the port channel portion off and try it again. I am running Enhanced vPC right now and this is what I am seeing. I am interested to see if anyone else out there has the actual EvPC working with VMWare across 2 FEX's.

Thanks!