Network Connectivity in UCS

[mehrantgs]

hi friends

i am implementing a cisco UCS environment and in networking step i have encountered a problem, steps which i have done are these:

configuring a port channel between FI and northbound switch that works properly and it's status is OK (port channel interface is trunked in both side with all vlans allowed)

creating a Lan Pingroup containing created port channel on FI and pinning some VNICs on server to it

installing an ESXi on a server that sees created VNICs and assigning an management IP to it

now the ESXi can ping it's local ip address but can not ping it's gateway.

where could be the problem?

thanks

[Kirk J · Accepted solution]

Greetings.

First question would be why you are using explicit pinning groups?

There are use cases for those, but don't apply to most customers.

You should generally allow the UCSM to take care of the dynamic pinning, and if you trying to setup a disjoint layer 2, make sure you use the vlan manager to appropriately prune the vlans from each of your sets of uplinks per FI.

Aside from that, do some mac learning checking.

Are you correctly tagging the esxi mgmt vlan with the vlan you are allowing on the service profile's vnic?  One of the common issues we see with with customers new to UCSM is doing both vlan tagging on the mgmt network vmk portgroup, and marking the esxi mgmt vlan as native in the service profile vnic vlan list.

For esxi you should allow the required vlans in the service profile without marking as native, and tag the appropriate vlans in the esxi vswitch, port group configuration.

Thanks,

Kirk...

[mehrantgs]

Hi Kirk

thanks to your reply

as i read in documents, we should pin any vNIC on servers to an uplink. and according to that i did those.

but do you mean that i should create a dynamic vNIC connection policy and let creating and pinning them automatically to uplinks? is it true?

so how creating a dynamic vNIC connection policy finds out desired uplink that it should use for pinning vNICs?

thanks

[Wes Austin · Accepted solution]

UCSM will automagically distribute your vNIC to the uplinks evenly based on load.

If you use a static pin group, you may be underutilizing certain links. Static Pin groups are to be used for certain use cases where you only want traffic to use a certain uplink for whatever reason.

[mehrantgs]

Thanks wes 😊