Cisco 6120xp with Direct Attached iSCSI and Uplink Ports

joeharb · ‎05-23-2012

We are in the process of deploying our B-Series with dual 6120's and dual Nexus 5010's. My first question is on the LAN uplinks. I would assume I would create a VPC on the 5K's to 6120's but my question is would I use a VPC for each 6120 connected to both 5010? So if I have a total of 4 10G links from the 6120's to 5010's would I have port channel 100 that is part of vpc 100 that is connected to one 6120 and then port channel 101 that is part of vpc 101 that is connected to the other 6120, or can this be done all with one port channel from the 5K's to the 6120's.

The other question is on the iSCSI side, I would prefer to allow the blade to boot to local disk for ESX and then have the iSCSI avaialbe for the Guests. All the documentation I have found is for booting to iSCSI, would the process be the same but I would not have to change the boot policy? I have found alot a documentation for using iSCSI direct attached via appliance ports but they all seem different in how to configure the vlans and overlays. Has anyone done this in production or any guidence on how to proceed.

Thanks,

Joe

padramas · ‎05-24-2012

Hello Joe,

We need to create two vPCs on N5K ( i.e one port-channel per FI 6120 )

I am not sure if I understood your iSCSI requirement. Are you trying to boot virtual machine of iSCSI LUN ( RDM ) or iSCSI datastore for the blade / ESXI host ?

I believe both deployment scenarios does not need any additional configuration from UCS,

Padma

joeharb · ‎05-24-2012

On the lan side each 5K would be connected to both FI's correct? So we would have VPC 100 and VPC101 on both 5K's with VPC100 representing FabricA and VPC101 representing FabricB.

On the storage question, I was thinking I would have to present the ESX server some type of iSCSI Vnic or HBA, is that not the case?

padramas · ‎05-24-2012

On the lan side each 5K would be connected to both FI's correct? So we would have VPC 100 and VPC101 on both 5K's with VPC100 representing FabricA and VPC101 representing FabricB.

Yes, you are correct.

Check out the video - Part 9

http://bradhedlund.com/2010/06/22/cisco-ucs-networking-best-practices/

We do not need additional iSCSI vNIC / configuration in UCS for ESXi to have iSCSI based datastore.

HTH

Padma