UCS B200M3 and Vsphere5.1 Network Design

[ITINFRAMOQ1]

Dear UCS experts,

We have recently aquired our UCS B200M3 Blades and currently planning the installation Vsphere 5.1 on that. Here is the currentt configuration we have

Chassis : 4 * 5108

Interconnect : 6296

IO Module : 2208 XP (4 cables from to each to interconnects )

Blades : UCS 200 M3 with 1240 LOM and Additional VIC 1280.

I am looking for a design which can ensure maximum bandwidth for my ESX 5.1 hosts.

Now as my chassis has four uplinks to interconnect, it can support upto 40G per fabric. i have the following queries

1. if i create just one vNIC on the VIC1280 will it be able to provide 40G uplink per vNIC interface or it can support only 10G per vNIC ? if it supports i can put entire traffic on single 40G pipe and use VMware NIOC for QOS. in case it can provide 40G speed will ESX supports it ?

2. Or is it best practise to create 4 vNIC per fabric ( 4 * 10G - total 8 per chassis) and isolate different traffics routed to each and create multiple UPlinks to the Cisco 1000 V.

Thanks

Anoop

[padramas]

Anoop,

IOM 2208 + VIC 1280 + VIC 1240 + B200 M3 with two CPUs combo will create four port-channels ( between adapter and IOM ) each with two 10G links

This will result in vNIC showing up as 20G NIC.

Please refer to

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10280/products_data_sheets_list.html

Figure 16

Option 2 - VIC 1240 and VIC 1280 to UCS 2208XP Fabric Extender

I have not clearly understood your second question.

Depending upon traffic load, you might want to distribute the vNICs between both FIs and provide redundancy using either Fabric failover or NIC teaming or port-channel with N1KV.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9902/prod_technical_reference_list.html

Padma

[ITINFRAMOQ1]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply, I would like to clarify the vNIC bandwidth here. in IOM2208+VIC1240+VIC1280 combination,

In server profile, if i create 2 vNICs how much bandwidth am i getting for that server, will that be 40 G to each fabric per vNIC?

and what is my per vNIC link speed in case i create 8 vNICs in my service profile ?

Anoop

[padramas]

Hello Anoop,

Each vNIC that you create will be of 20G ( two 10G traces per port-channel ) .

Padma

[lwatta]

I just want to add that you need to keep in mind that the 20GB you are getting is a port-channel so in some instances you are not going to get a full 20GB of throughput. Everything is going to depend on how hashable the traffic is. This is especially true with vMotion vmk interfaces.

So keep this in mind if you are doing any performance testing.

louis