Nexus 1000V - High availability of SC + VMotion

[tobiasdreyer]

Hello,

I'm trying to configure a high availability senario for the Service Console und the VMotion Interface. My goal is, that in default status the Service Console uses one physical NIC and the VMotion Interface uses an other NIC. If one of theses NICs or their connection fails, both Inferfaces (SC + VMotion) should use the same remaining NIC.

Service Console and VMotion use two different VLANs and are connected to the Nexus.

My first idea was vPC-HM with MAC-Pinning, but I'm searching for a simple solution which can be easily deployed on many clusters/ESX.

I would appreciate any idea.

Greetz

Tobias

[nsundar]

Hello,

   You are on the right track in considering MAC pinning with port channels. You could use static port channels as well, but that won't give you the ability to pin specific interfaces to specific uplinks.

May we know why it is considered complicated? It doesn't require port channels upstream, so it should actually be a little simpler.

[tobiasdreyer]

Hello,

this solution is too complicated because every vMotion and ServiceConsole MAC-Address has to be configured to their uplinks. In a large enviroment which is growing very fast, this solution is not feasible.

Because of the importance of the SC interface and the large traffic amount in case of a vMotion event, we want to use a dedicated nic for SC and vMotion.

[nsundar]

Hi,

   You don't need to configure static pinning to make use of MAC pinning i.e. you do not have to manually assign the SC and VMotion vmknics to specific uplinks. In particular, if you have a dedicated NIC for VMotion which carries only the VMotion VLAN and nothing else, the VMotion vmknic will get pinned to it be default. Similarly, if you have a dedicatedNIC that carries just the two VLANs for SC and VMotion, both those vmknics will get pinned to that specific uplink, without any manual configuration.

Regards,

Sundar.

[tobiasdreyer]

Hello,

the problem is, that the SC and vMotion have different VLANs. So if I configure for each VLAN a seperat interface, a failover is not possible. If I allow both VLANs on both NICs, I don't know how to configure that, if both NICs are available, the SC uses one NICs and vMotion the other.

These setup is needed, because in case of a vMotion event there should be always enough bandwidth for the SC. QOS is not available.

Regards

tobias

[nsundar]

May I ask which N1k version you are using -- is it 4.0(4)SV1(3)?

You can create a port channel with 2 dedicated pnics, and make it a trunk with just the SC and vMotion VLANs. N1k will try to distribute the veths across available PC subgroups (individual uplinks in the PC, for MAC pinning), so they should get pinned to different pnics. If there is a problem, flapping the upstream port for the pnic that has both the veths should trigger a rebalancing.

HTH.

Cheers & Regards,

Sundar.