Best practices for amount of uplinks/downlinks needed on UCS 6200

[martinezaw]

Hi all... I was wondering if anyone knows how the needed amount of uplinks from UCS fabric interconnects to upstream switches is determined. I also would like to know how the number of links between FEX mods and fabric interconnects are determined. If anyone knows of any documentation as well, that would be great. Let's assume FI is a 6248. Each chassis has 8 blades. How many chassis can be supported with balance between bandwidth needs but not wasting FEX or FI ports?

[padramas]

Hello,

It depends upon the network needs of the applications that you run on top of these blades in each chassis.

If you are running FI 62XX, IOM 220X and Cisco VIC adapters, then it gives you a lot of flexibility in scaling up the bandwidth as needed.

Few suggestions are

1) Enable fabric port-channel ( between IOM and FI ) . You can add links as needed in the future.

Cabling considerations for Fabric port channel

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/unified_computing/ucs/sw/gui/config/guide/2.0/b_UCSM_GUI_Configuration_Guide_2_0_chapter_0101.html#concept_5D3D88341BFB43468B62B5A77876C67B

2) Configure single link discovery policy.From redundancy perspective, using two links protects from cable, port failures.

3) You can have different number of IOM - FI links for different chassis as per bandwidth requriements.

I do not know if there is a doc that provides guidelines on determining number of links required ( FEX- FI and upstream )

Cisco Validated Desgin guides might help you as reference for your deployment

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns743/networking_solutions_program_home.html

HTH

Padma