FC Port Channel, Storage Cloud???

[K P SIM]

Hi. Cisco gurus:

May I have the authoritative answers on the following?

1. What is the Use Case of FC Port Channel under SAN Cloud assuming I have the typical Cisco VSAN setup-1 VSAN tied to 1 SAN Switch and 1 FCoE VLAN and another VSAN with diff. VSAN and FCoE ids, etc?

1.1 What is the commands needed in MDS switch to match the FC Port Channel in UCS so as to make it works, so to speak.

1.2 Will it make any differences between the End-Host Mode and Switch Mode?

2.
What is the benefits of FC Port Channels? Is it REALLY necessary at all assuming the same as 1 above with 2 Uplink FC Per Fabric Interconnect?

3.

What is the Use Case of Storage Cloud? Is it ONLY for direct-attached FC storage to our Fabric Interconnect?

Thank again. Help me to help Cisco to sell more UCS.

SiM

[rammuthaiya]

Hi Sim,

1.1 . FC port channel does the FC bandwidth aggregation and there will be no impact incase single port failure.In UCS along with FC port channel we can enable trunk which carries multiple VSAN info on a port channel.

1.1. Please check the command reference and you have to designate the port type as F.

1.2 It works irrespective of FI mode.

2. It depends on the requiremnt and your design.

3. Yes, it is meant for FC direct attached storage.

Ram

[K P SIM]

Ram:

For Question 1.1, even without FC Port Channel, a single port or FC Uplink failure WILL STILL NOT AFFECT anything assume I have a minimum of 2 FC Uplinks? So can you elaborate more here? I am trying to find what is a good reason to use FC Port Channel.

VSAN Trunking-Yes, I know VSAN Trunking allows more than 1 VSAN to be trunked.

I want to know again WHEN DO we do that as in a typical UCS Setup with 2 FI and 2 SAN Switches, each FI, hence each SAN Switch CAN ONLY HAVE 1 VSAN, So what is the USE CASE here?

Question 2.

WHAT exactly is that requirements? That is WHAT I need to know.

Can you or other Cisco folks, PLEASE ADVISE as I am waiting for an authoritative and definitive answers?

Thanks.

SiM

[Jeremy Waldrop]

Sim, assuming you aren't using pin groups UCS will automatically re-pin the server vNIC/vHBA in the evnet of a LAN/SAN uplink failure. This re-pinning will take a few seconds but that isn't enough that you would notice the down time.

With a port channel no re-pinning has to happen as there is only a single logical uplink. When physical connection in a port channels fails there is a sub-second convergence time.

Port channels offer better band-width utilization because all servers are pinned to a single logical uplink.

If you do not have MDS FC switches then you can't create a SAN port channel. For non-MDS environments with 2 or more FC uplinks UCS will perform dynamic pinning of server vHBAs to those uplinks in a round-robin fashion. If one of the uplinks fails UCS will re-pin those vHBAs to another uplink.

Most of our UCS customers don't need VSAN trunking as they ony have 1 VSAN northbound from each fabric but if you did have more the one VSAN on your fabric then you could provision a vHBA to be in that VSAN. For example lets say you had 2 storay arrays on each SAN fabric and each was in its own VSAN. You could create vHBAs in the different VSANs so that you could build a server that has access to LUNs in either array.

[K P SIM]

Jeremy:

You are RIGHT & SPOT ON. That is exactly what I am looking for.

Thanks. Now, I am more competent to explain to partners/customers, etc.

SiM