Best Practice on trunking VSAN 1

[Steven.langdale_2]

Hello all

I'd appreciate feedback on wether this is looked upon as good practice or not.

For all the Cisco SAN implementations I have done to date, I have always trunked VSAN1 (but obviously NOT used it for customer data).  I do this for a couple of reasons.

1.  It is a good test for an ISL, you can initially trunk VSAN1 to be 100% all is OK, before affecting customer VSAN's

2.  Fabric manager is not "erroring" by reporting segmented VSAN's

What do the rest of you do?  Is there a Cisco best practice on this?

Thanks

Steven

[dynamoxxx]

i leave mine segmented

https://supportforums.cisco.com/thread/2042876?tstart=240

[kenk]

Hi Steven,

Assuming that the default zone is set to "deny" for VSAN 1 (it is by default), there's no harm in trunking VSAN 1.

Regards,

Ken

[hershal06]

I trunk VSAN 1 between our switches. I use VSAN 1 to create a back-end network so I can get to switches that don't have access to our LAN.

[Ralf Eberhardt]

Vsan 1 is also used for cfs. Best practice is to trunk it to all switches but not to use it for production traffic.

Ralf

Sent from Cisco Technical Support iPad App

[Steven.langdale_2]

Ralf

They are interesting statements.  Can you elaborate (any documentation) on them both please?

Specifically:

"Vsan 1 is also used for cfs"

&

"Best practice is to trunk it to all switches"

Thanks

Steven

[Ralf Eberhardt]

Steven,
CFS stands for Cisco Fabric Services. It can be used to distribute configuration information between MDS switches to keep the configuration consistent. It  can be used for various things like NTP settings, Syslog config, call home config etc.
You can find more information in the MDS documentation on CCO. See here for example:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/datacenter/mds9000/sw/5_0/configuration/guides/sysmgnt/nxos/cfs.html

CFS uses VSAN 1.

As for best practices, there is a document also on CCO:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/ps4159/ps6409/ps5990/white_paper_C11-515630.html

This talks a bit about VSAN 1. I can tell you that I have installed lots of MDS SANs during the past 9 years and it is one of the things I’d do from experience. Use VSAN 1 for management purposes like CFS and put your real production traffic in other VSANs.

Ralf

[Steven.langdale_2]

Ralf

I know what CFS is but i cannot find any reference that it uses / needs VSAN 1.  Is that documented anywhere?  Further up the thread dynamoxxx has said he leaves them segmented, so i'm strugging to see how it is needed for CFS.

As for best practice, again there is no reference to trunking VSAN 1 - I know not to use it for production traffic, but nowhere do I see trunking it as a best practice.

Thanks

Steven

[scott.holman]

Hi Steven,

Did you ever get an official cisco documented best practice for this?

Scott