Benefits to vPC on 6200s (Fabric interconnects) in UCS

[kmjohnsonkjua]

I'm a network guy, not VMware.  There are benefits to having the Nexus 5Ks vPC'd together and have a single port channel going upstream to a pair of vPC'd 7Ks.  I've heard this refered to as a 'bowtie' or 'figure 8'.

Are there similar benefits with the UCS 6Ks to the 7Ks or with the ensuing VMware cfg?  Like maybe simplifying the pinning to the uplinks.

Or is it just a plain bad idea?

Thanks,

--

Ken J

[Robert Burns]

Ken,

The 6200's are not clustered switches as you might find with a pair of N5Ks/N7Ks.  Best practice for UCS uplinks in thei regard would be to create port channels on from each 6200 side, going up to separate N5K/N7Ks as VPCs.    This gives full mesh redundancy from each fabric.

From a VMware perspective, you would not do any specialized channeling at the vSwitch/vDS level.   You woud use the default vSwitch teaming method - which is Source-Base-On-Virtual-Port-ID.  This allows multlple uplinks connected to the same vSwitch wtihin VMware, without having to aggregate any of the links.  This would completely complement the UCS configuration.

Hope this makes sense, if not let me know.

These two deployement guide would be a good read for you:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/solutions/Enterprise/Borderless_Networks/Smart_Business_Architecture/February2012/SBA_Mid_DC_UnifiedComputingSystemDeploymentGuide-February2012.pdf

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/ns340/ns414/ns742/ns743/ns748/landing_dcServer-blade.html

Regards,

Robert