UCS | ACI | VMM integration

[gregnewuk]

Hi,

We are having some issues, possibly my lack of understanding, on ACI, UCS, vSphere 6.7 u2 and VMM integration and I'm wondering if someone can point me in the right direction please. We have met all the pre-reqs in the guide, https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/aci/apic/sw/4-x/virtualization/Cisco-ACI-Virtualization-Guide-411/Cisco-ACI-Virtualization-Guide-411_chapter_01110.html.

UCS 4.0(4b)

ACI 4.1(not 100% sure which release but very recent)

vSphere 6.7 u2

I'm the UCS / VMware guy and see that the VDS is pushed into vCenter and the PortGroup is created. The VLAN is added as a global VLAN in UCS and added to a new VLAN Group. The final part, that I can't get my head around, is how / if the VLAN should be automatically added to the vNIC  Templates? I could manually add the VLAN Group to the correct vNIC Templates but it doesn't feel right to be doing so.

Should I be expecting the VLAN to be added to the vNIC Template or is this a manual task?

-The vNICs are updating templates, primary template for A and secondary templates for B, which are consumed by a LAN Connectivity Policy. We have 10 vNICs:

vmnic0 / 1- esxi mgmt A / B

vmnic2 / 3 - vMotion A / B

vmnic4 / 5 - VMs A / B

vmnic6 / 7 - ACI A /  B

vmnic8 / 9 - Spare A / B

I was hoping that ACI would be able to add the VLAN onto vmnic6 / 7, as these NICs are attached to the VMM integrated VDS, vmnic0 - 5 are attached to a manually created VDS and are 'static' VLANs.

Any pointers greatly received. We have a TAC case open.

Thanks,

Gerg

[Kirk J]

Looking at the config guides, https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/aci/apic/sw/4-x/virtualization/Cisco-ACI-Virtualization-Guide-411/Cisco-ACI-Virtualization-Guide-411_chapter_01110.html, it makes reference to letting ACI preserve or remove Pre-existing VLANs already present on the the vnic templates, so it would seem that in a correctly working scenario that ACI orchestration would configure this portion of the configuration.

While I'm not part of ACI support team, I have had a lot of cases involving issues with ACI due to various CDP/LLDP issues where UCSM or ESXi hosts were not correctly passing CDP info correctly (or was passing wrong mgmt IP address in CDP info) that caused ACI DVS port group/uplink programming issues.

Kirk...

[gregnewuk]

Hi Kirk,

Thanks for this. 

We have a TAC case open, 687226006, but haven't heard back yet.

It would seem sensible that ACI is able to update the vNIC Templates however it isn't! The vNICs which are attached to the VMM VDS are vmnic6 / 7 and have CDP enabled, LLDP disabled.

We could manually add the VLAN Group to the vNIC Templates for vmnic6 / 7 but this would mean the process isn't fully automated within ACI.

Cheers,

Gerg

[gregnewuk]

We basically hit a bug CSCvp73395!

https://bst.cloudapps.cisco.com/bugsearch/bug/CSCvp73395/?reffering_site=dumpcr

The workaround is to configure the 'Redundancy Type' on the vNIC Templates to 'No Redundancy'. In my case we have 2 vNIC Templates that will be attached to a VMM integrated VDS so I have updated the configuration on those vNIC Templates and left the remainder of the vNIC Templates as primary / secondary.

Supposedly ACI 4.2.x will work with vNIC Templates that are configured for NIC redundancy. It seems a sham to have to remove the configuration. The un-official workaround would be to manually add the VLAN Group to the Primary vNIC Template, however we don't want to head outside the box!

Here are some keywords in the hope that others will be able to find this information...
UCS, UCSM, ACI, VMM, VLAN Groups, vNIC Templates

Cheers,

Gerg

[YanL]

If someone else is looking at this I would recommend using VLAN Groups on you NIC Templates, I personally prefer managing VLAN Groups rather than adding individual VLANs to the NIC templates, then in the UCSM integration you can specify which VLAN Groups you want to target for your integration.