Cisco FI 6248UP to Nexus 5Ks connectivity

[Luke Akpor]

Hi Guys,

Can someone please advise me the best way to implement the following connections?

I am trying to connect a pair of Fabric Interconnect (6248UP with 32ports) to a pair of Nexus 5Ks (5548UP) with the 5Ks connecting directly to the Storage (EMC). This is for a small deployment. The 5Ks will be running the full Fabric Services such as configuring the zoning, etc. By the way vPC will running between the FIs and the 5Ks for ethernet traffic only.

My question are:

1.       What type of connection should I use between the 6248UP-FIs and the pair of 5Ks. Should I configure say 2 of the ports on the FIs as FC Uplink ports and use an FC SFP (e.g DS-SFP-FC8G-SW) for the connections? This way both the 5K and the FI will be running native FC in-between at 8G. Is this the best practice?

2.       Is it possible to run FCoE from the FI directly to the 5Ks and just running the native FC from the 5K to the EMC Storage?

3.       Is there any Cisco doc or someone's blog I can be pointed to that could help in the best practice for such scenario?

Any answers or further suggestions will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.....

[Luke Akpor]

Thanks Padma you are a star.

[Robert Burns]

Luke,

Can you provide a screen shot of your boot policy?  If you only have a single target configured (single path) then only one Fabric will FLOGI.  The remaining path will not come up until the OS fnic drivers load.

Regards,

Robert

[Luke Akpor]

Hi Robert,

Interesting....

Here is my boot policy as attached.

Thanks

[Robert Burns · Accepted solution]

Add your second boot target "fc1" (guessing at the vHBA name) with the WWN of Fabric B's target.

Robert

[Luke Akpor]

Hi Robert,

I am glad to say the issue has now been resolved.

I can see all my initiators on Fabric A and B which looks good.

I had to disassociate the SP and re-associated them to the servers for it to show up on the flogi database.

Thanks Robert and Padma for all your assistance.

Case Closed

Luke

[Robert Burns]

Great to hear.  Was going to mention that.  By re-assoc. your SP, you're re-establigh the pinning across available uplinks.  A clue to this problem was the "bound IF down" error you saw in NXOS.

Let us know if you have any further issues. 

Robert