Brocade to Cisco Migration

acdixon9201 · ‎03-02-2016

Hello All. We recently purchased four MDS 9148’s to replace our old Brocade 5100’s. Our current plan is to go 2 + 2 setup where 2 are Fabric A and the other 2 are Fabric B. We have two Dell Compellent storage arrays, one on each pair, we also have two separate UCS clusters, one on each pair of MDS’s, and some Dell rack mount servers. While I do not think we will use VSAN’s to their fullest potential, I have created a VSAN (vsan 2) on each fabric so the zoneset will not be on the default VSAN. I’m looking to get some advice / best practice setups for this swap over. While this is not a terribly large implementation I’m just looking for any advice and suggestions anyone has or if they have gone through the same type of migration.

Thanks

Walter Dey · ‎03-02-2016

I assume you need 2 MDS 9148 per fabric because of the number of required F-ports, attaching hosts and storage ?

Anyway, I would recommend you create at least one vsan per fabric, and please different ! =/ 1

eg. vsan 10 for fabric A, and 20 for fabric B.

To attach UCS, you need to enable feature npiv and f-portchannel-trunking.

I would also avoid any configuration that links Brocade and MDS, because interop modes are really challenging.

Migration of one fabric and if successful, the other one as well is the way to go.