NetApp direct connect to UCS best practices

[David.Jarzynka]

Folks,

I have installed many FlexPods this year but all involved either Nexus 5Ks or 7Ks with vPC. This protects the NFS LUN connections from both network outages or UCSM FIM outages. What is not clear to me is the best practice on connecting a NetApp directly to the UCS via applaince ports. Appliance ports seem like a great idea but they seem to ass issues to designs, both in VMware and the network.

Does anyone have a configuration example on both the NetApp, UCS & Vmware side?

I thought I would ask the group their opinion.

Cheers,

David Jarzynka

[richard.pugh]

I along with many others, including Cisco SE's have been nagging NetApp and Cisco for this information since their release of the 1.4 code. Every article and whitepaper I have been sent includes a Nexus, never a direct connection. I have deployed a directly connected NetApp Array but the issue I have is that it is an Active/Passive connection and if a VIF faults, my NFS volumes drop.

I have been told by Cisco to connect my NetApp using MultiMode VIFs with Second Level VIFs for failover. Cisco has also stated to only use 10Gb links to directly attach Storage. When I speak to NetApp, they say that their best practices is not to directly connect, but to use a Nexus as the connection medium with vPC as the devices will learn all MACs.

[padramas]

With 1.4, FI cannot be directly connected to FC storage array and via FCoE ( FC storage port on FI )  without a bridge device ( MDS / N5K )  to it.

NAS devices can be attached by configuring FI port as appliance port. The following post has additional details on it.

https://communities.cisco.com/docs/DOC-24197

https://communities.cisco.com/docs/DOC-23196

HTH

Padma

[David.Jarzynka]

Thank you Padma. UCS appliance ports seem mad for the SMB and not larger enterprise. Its it to bad that most folks seem to think direct connections are a good idea without thinking of the drawbacks.

It seems a lot of risk for little reward in the Enterprise space.

Cheers,

Dave

[pat1848]

Hi David

Can you clarify your last posting a little bit.

I never installed direct attached NetApp Storage to the UCS as well.

One drawback i see is, if you have your NetApp System in active/standby mode connected to the FI, then for example all Servers connect through FI A to the NetApp System (NIC with VMKernel for all Server active on FI A). If the NetApp Link fails and switches over to standby link on Fabric B all the Traffic will go form Server to FI A to Uplink Switch to FI B and then to the NetApp System - because the Server is not aware that the NetApp System did a failover. So not all companies will have 10G Uplink Switches which will cause a bottleneck in that case.

What other things do you see? I agree completely with you - all say is a wonderful feature on the slides - but i don't think it's that smart in practise?

Thanks for a short replay.

Cheers

Patrick

[pat1848]

Any comments on this?

I would highly appreciate if someone could bring in some drawbacks of the directly attached netapp design.

Cheers

Patrick

[David.Jarzynka]

Folks,

Thanks for all the comments. We figured it out and here is what we found. We cabled the NetApp to the UCS with each FIM having a dual path to the NetApp. Each path was setup as Active/Passive within the NetApp (static paths) with UCS failover enabled. Within VMware we did Active/Passive within the vSwitch and enable beacon probing. Once we did this, the NFS connection was stable.

We rebooted the FIMs and all was well. I would rather have connected the NetApp to Nexus 5Ks but the design was cooked prior to the engagment. In my opinion I would avoid appliance ports unless it is your last resort. There are some dangers in traffic traversing the LAN and unless all items are configured correctly, you will may never have a stable NFS connection to VMware.

Thanks for all your comments,

Dave