Appliance ports / iSCSI boot / iSCSI vlans

NaelShahid_2 · ‎11-09-2013

If the iscsi vlans do not need to be accessible from outside of the ucs domain do they need to be on the uplink connections?

I have an issue in which the iscsi vnics can’t ping the iscsi targets, however, from outside of the ucs domain I can ping both the iscsi target and iscsi vnics from my laptop…

Is it a case of the iscsi vnics are being pinned to the uplink port and hence traffic is not seeing the appliance ports?

Boudewijn Plomp · ‎11-09-2013

I don't have your setup in front of me. For my understanding, you have connected your iSCSI targets/network on an Appliance port, right? If that is the case you have to pin the iSCSI vNICs to the proper Pin Group.

NaelShahid_2 · ‎11-09-2013

You are correct, iscsi target connected to appliance ports. My understanding is that you do not require a pin group as an applicance port with do mac learning. Also, you can only create a pin group with uplink ports only?

Boudewijn Plomp · ‎11-21-2013

Neal, now that mention I start to doubt as well. Currently I don't have an appliance port connected, so I am unable to test it. Did you figure it out?

NaelShahid_2 · ‎11-22-2013

Don’t need to pin the iscsi vnics as the appliance ports do (and did) learn the storage MACs so traffic switches directly to them from the iscsi vnics (even with the iscsi vlans on the uplinks). One thing I have noticed tho is that the iscsi vnics do not respond to a ping, however they do reply to ARP.. Maybe the full network layer (ICMP) is not fully loaded this early. This through me a little as all the troubleshooting guides state to ping the iscsi vnics from the storage.

matao · ‎11-25-2013

If the iscsi vlans do not need to be accessible from outside of the ucs domain do they need to be on the uplink connections?

If the UCS is running on end host mode, then appliance port will also need to pin to an uplink. appliance's MAC would be learned by UCS Fabric Interconnect as well, just like vNIC. The appliance' MAC and iSCSI initiator MAC is learned on the same FI, the traffic would be from iSCSI vNIC -> FI -> appliance port.

If your vNIC is pined to FI-A and your appliance port is pinned to FI-B, then the traffic is like vNIC -> FI-A -> upstream -> FI-B -> appliance port.

From your description, it seems that the upstream switch does not allow the VLAN and your vNIC and appilance port's MAC are learned from different FIs. To confirm that, you can try

UCS-A(nxos)# show mac address-table vlan | in

and check whether they are learned on the same FI.

NaelShahid_2 · ‎11-25-2013

Hi - Not sure what mean as we have resolved this issue, as in my previous post.