Deploying Hyper V on Cisco UCS (Converged networking in VMM or on hardware)

[Jason Flory]

Hello Everyone

This is kind of a high level question and wanted to know peoples opinions on how to setup networking.  Currently we have a few clusters running on 6 1 x GB links and use converged networking to team all nics together and use VMM logical switches to split traffic up into management, cluster, live migration, and VM guest network which is using Vlan tags to identify which vlan they are on.  Storage backend is Nimble using ISCSI

With Cisco UCS we now have 10 GB networking and have the ability to split traffic up at the hardware level and still take advantage of shared bandwidth.  If i am understanding documentation right, I can carve up each nic into smaller Vnics and priortize traffic but still have the full bandwidth on link.

When I research this the docs talk about VM-FEX which sounds like an additional hardware component we do not have, unless that is standard with UCS. 

Just wondering what the pros and cons are for each setup.  The obvious one is moving converged networking to UCS is that it would take the network processing load out of host and into FIs.  

Please let me know your thoughts and any hyper v best practices.   What would real great is if someone has a good design guide for this type of setup.

Thanks

[Walter Dey]

Hi Jason

VM-FEX for Hyper-V setup can be found here

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/sw/vm_fex/hyperv/gui/config_guide/2-2/b_GUI_Hyper-V_VM-FEX_UCSM_Configuration_Guide_2_2.pdf

It doesn't require additional hardware, assuming that you are using a VIC I/O adaptor.

Walter.

[Jason Flory]

I guess I am confused about FEX.  I thought FEX was an actual external card or something you plug into your IO Modules.  The NICs on servers are Cisco 1340 VIC.   Does this mean I can follow the FEX setup?

Right now I cannot even get this NICs to communicate with network. There are faults saying VIF link down.

[Walter Dey]

Hi Jason

VM-FEX is the extension of the FEX architecture to a VM (see attachment)

Walter.