ISL beteen Cisco Nexus 5000 and Cisco MDS 9020

[harald_jensas]

Hi,

I need to hook my existing MDS 9020 fabric to a new Nexus 5000 fabric so that my new ESX servers can access old storage and vMotion it to new storage. New hosts and storage direct attached to Nexus 5000, and old storage is direct attached to MDS 9020.

Nexus is running 5.x firmware.

MDS is running 2.1(3), wich is the latest available for MDS 9020...

Anyon have experience with such a setup?

Do I need to set any inter-op mode?

(The only thing I can find in doc's is that I need to use pWWN zoneing only when there is MDS 9020 switch in fabric.)

Best Regards

Harald Jensås

[dynamoxxx]

did you try my reply on PowerLink ?

[harald_jensas]

Will try tomorrow. I will post results in both forums.

[harald_jensas]

This worked out great.

I was unable to create VSAN's on the MDS 9020.

What I did was:

- Create a new VSAN (1000) on the Nexus

- Add a port to the new VSAN (1000)

-  Verified Domain ID of new VSAN and compared to Domain ID on MDS 9020 to  make sure there would be no "two switches with same Domain ID)

- Connected that port to the MDS 9020

- Ran "show fcdomain domain-list" on both Nexus and MDS 9020 to verify.

- Copyed/Activated the zoneset from 9020 to the new VSAN (1000).

--> Tried to see if I could use inter-VSAN-routing, but this was not supported on any switch according to DCNM.

- Manually replicated all zones from the production VSAN (2000) on the Nexus to the zoneset on VSAN (1000)

- Copyed and Activated the zoneset on VSAN (1000) to VSAN (2000).

- Reconfigured the port connecting the Nexus to the MDS 9020 to be member of VSAN (2000).

--> At this point I verified all Server-to-Storage connections was still working.

- Added zones to VSAN (2000) zoneset so that servers connected to Nexus switch could see storage connected to MDS 9020.

--> New hosts loged into storage connected to MDS 9020 fine and masking LUNs to the new servers worked fine.

[Yacine Hidouche]

HI Herald,

What do you mean by

Manually replicated all zones from the production VSAN (2000) on the Nexus to the zoneset on VSAN (1000)

Cheers

Yac

[gaasedelen]

Could you share the powerlink url you're talking about?

[sbhadrav@cisco.com]

Virtual SAN (VSAN) technology partitions a single physical SAN into multiple VSANs. VSAN capabilities allow Cisco NX-OS software to logically divide a large physical fabric into separate, isolated environments to improve Fibre Channel SAN scalability, availability, manageability, and network security. For FICON, VSANs facilitate hardware-based separation of FICON and open systems.
please check below link for more info :-
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/nexus5000/sw/san_switching/b_Cisco_Nexus_5000_Series_NX-OS_SAN_Switching_Configuration_Guide/Cisco_Nexus_5000_Series_NX-OS_SAN_Switching_Configuration_Guide_chapter2.html