ALCON,
Hello to all. This is my first post with Cisco Support Forums. Usually, I have used it for good technical insight in random bugs throughout my career. I would like to thank everyone for diligently opening up your solutions to the community. It is a help to every terminal warrior in the Cisco realm haha.
So I am currently working a project that is a bit above my pay grade and I came here to look for some insight on how I would like to set it up. I will try to keep it simple until details are asked for.
I currently have a customer who we have installed a high capacity compute cluster combined with a high density storage cluster. This customer has installed their cluster and provided us with FOUR Cisco Nexus 3172PQ 10GE/40GE Switches. Now when I say high density, I am talking over 1TB data streams crossing over these 4 switches from our 6509E Core, plus lots of switch to switch exchanges. I will attach a simple topology.
I installed the cluster in a mesh that I figured would allow for the most amount of Bandwidth and Reliability, as well as load-balancing. Unfortunately, In my ignorance of the Nexus OS, configured these redundant links with Port-Channels and created a spanning tree loop in my VLAN that is causing their applications to lock up. This has caused my director to look at my configuration and tell me it's too complicated and that he wants it simplified. I told him I wanted to keep it the same, but learn how to set it up utilizing the features of the Nexus OS. We will be transitioning our Core to Nexus very soon and it would also be a great learning opportunity.
My supervisor wants to "uncomplicate" my design by making the topology hub and spoke, meaning that the one switch connected to the core will bear ALL of the traffic instead of dispersing it among the whole four, which I thought would be the best practice.
In reference to the attached PDF, would I be right in saying that the most optimal configuration would be to do a Double Side vPC setup between the core > cluster > NIC Teaming Nodes. I would REALLY appreciate the communities professional opinions on this, as I am trying very hard to push myself into the virtual world.
