Using external ports on UCS fabric interconnects

[Jason Flory]

Hello Everyone

We have a new UCS with 2 fabric interconnects and I want to uplink the ISCSI NICS of an external non cisco server.   From what I have read it sounds like using an appliance port is the way to go.  However I noticed on the appliance port configuration it does not see the Vlans already defined.  The server will only be communicating with an upstream SAN on our core switch.  If you have to define VLANs separately on external does that mean if my server were to communicate with a down stream Cisco blade it would have to send traffic up to core and then back down again even if it were on the same VLAN?  Just trying to understand this.  Would it be better to configure switch mode?   I know you lose some functionality with switch mode.

Thanks

[Saurabh Kothari · Accepted solution]

Jason,

I dont' know if you have read it already but here is the appliance port connectivity doc.

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/servers-unified-computing/ucs-5100-series-blade-server-chassis/116075-ucs-app-connectivity-tshoot-00.html

thanks,

Saurabh

[Jason Flory]

Hey Everyone

So I was able to do this using appliance ports with no problem.  I do understand that we will not get any TAC support using these ports in this fashion.   

The server is only connected using its ISCSI nics and ISCSI target is on the northbound switch.   When we originally purchased our re-sellers told us we could move our other servers to the FIs to save on 10 GB ports to make room for the uplinks from the FIs.

Next purchase will be nexus 9k switches.

Thanks everyone

[Walter Dey · Accepted solution]

Hi Jason

- Appliance ports are used to connect IP storage systems (iSCSI, NFS, CIFS) directly to FI.

- Cisco doesn't support connecting non Cisco servers directly to FI; connect them to a North bound switch.

- In the ethernet Vlan section of UCS manager you see 2 clouds: SAN cloud and storage cloud. The vlan's for the appliance ports must be defined in the storage cloud.

Walter.