connect fabric interconnect clusters together using FC uplink ports in FC switching mode

[Amr Hafez]

Hi 

I have the infrastructure as shown in the below figure

both fabric clusters are in FC switching mode and in EHM 

the blades are not added to HX cluster

the storage directly connected to FI 6248 using FC storage uplinks

the blades are zonned to the storage and worked correctly

now, when I tried to connect both clusters using FC uplinks, it worked and up then I created the zone from rack servers to the Netapp but when enabled the FC zone at the default VSAN, the storage disconnected from the blade servers and the traffic down

any help??

the main target is to make the HX nodes to see the SAN storage to migrate the VM using storage vMotion

[Walter Dey]

Hi

I don't think this can work, nor is supported

Cisco UCS Manager supports switch-based Fibre Channel zoning and Cisco UCS Manager-based Fibre Channel zoning. You cannot configure a combination of zoning types in the same Cisco UCS domain. You can configure a Cisco UCS domain with one of the following types of zoning:

• Cisco UCS Manager-based Fibre Channel zoning—This configuration combines direct attach storage with local zoning. Fibre Channel or FCoE storage is directly connected to the fabric interconnects and zoning is performed in Cisco UCS Manager, using Cisco UCS local zoning. Any existing Fibre Channel or FCoE uplink connections need to be disabled. Cisco UCS does not currently support active Fibre Channel or FCoE uplink connections coexisting with the utilization of the UCS Local Zoning feature.

• Switch-based Fibre Channel zoning—This configuration combines direct attach storage with uplink zoning. The Fibre Channel or FCoE storage is directly connected to the fabric interconnects and zoning is performed externally to the Cisco UCS domain through an MDS or Nexus 5000 switch. This configuration does not support local zoning in the Cisco UCS domain.

It is officially supported however to create 2 VSAN's, one with UCS the other with switch-based zoning. (which contradicts above statement)

I have done such configurations, with external N5k / MDS !

Connecting the FI's of 2 UCS domains with FC is definitely not supported !

Connect your storage to a external MDS (FI in FC end host mode) ! MDS 91xx is not that expensive.

Please be aware, that the FI FC switch implementation is not 100% MDS / N5k compliant !