Hello everyone, we have a brand new 5108 chassis with 4 B200 M4 blade servers and 1340 VNIC modules. Our goal is to replace our current Xen and ESX server infrastructure with Windows a 2012R2 HV cluster. Another important change to our infrastructure is, we want to start leveraging storage spaces and windows Scale Out file server and RDMA/ROCE. Basically, using SOFS as our storage controller for our HV cluster.
Our current SOFS nodes have 2X dual port Mellanox Connect-X-3 10GB NICS, which gives me 4 lanes to connect my HV hosts to the active SOFS node.
I have reviewed the getting started guide published by Cisco and in it, it recommends to create 4 SMB interfaces, 2 for the host and 2 for the VM's. it also recommends to NOT set the vnic to failover. So my first question is, to leverage the 4 lanes on my SOFS node, should I create 4 NICS on FEX A and 4 NICS on FEX B? Then I can create 2 additional SMB VNICS, for the rare cases when I need to present storage directly to my VM. Can some please confirm that I'm on the right track here?
The other concern I have is; for SMB multipath to work, each interface that participates in the RMDA traffic must tag the traffic. I do see that it is possible to tag the traffic from the UCS management console. But my concern is that the HV host has to build the frames with the .1Q tags to initiate the multipath communications to the remote host. When I look at the advanced properties of the VNIC in the 2012R2 host, I do not see any advanced options where I can actually tag the traffic for that NIC. How can I tag the traffic in the host?
Thank you for any assistance with these rookie questions.
Best regards
