UCS Nexus Best Practices

[abbasali5]

I have a customer who have (2) Cisco Nexus 5500UP connected to a pair of Fabric Interconnects.  Each 5500 connectes to both FIs with VPC.  They also have Fabric Interconnects cross connected which I don't see in any Cisco best practices docs.  Is there an advantage of this?

In this Layer 3 configuration, When they tried to uprade 5500 NX-OS, each at a time, it brought everything down.  Not sure, if this happened because of the fact that the Fabric Interconnects are cross connected.

Please advise!

[Walter Dey]

Hi

Have a look at Fig 11 in

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/switches/nexus-7000-series-switches/white_paper_c11-623265.html

It refers to N7k, but it will apply to N5k as well.

Properly done, N5k should not be a single point of failure; you can do firmware upgrade without disruption of the UCS traffic.

Did you check, that the UCS FI mode is: Ethernet End Host Mode (EHM), which is the default ?

In this mode, the link between the 2 FI's is never used for data traffic.