ucs chassis qos support

[terry.cleeton]

I  bought a UCS chassis with two blades that are 'qualified' for Cisco  Voice products (cm, ccx, etc)....     i decided to not buy the $20,000  worth of VMWARE enterprise pro licenses and the v1000 switch... since  the ROI is simply not there (I'd rather have 4 separate pieces of  hardware then spend that much money on software)...  anyway...   so now  my questions are:

1. What QoS options are available (if any) on the uplink from the chassis to the 6120s and from the 6120s to my 4500 switch.

2.  What Qos options are available (if any) on individual hosts inside my vmware.

3.  Can I buy the v1000 switch (which i believe is a few grand) and get  some QoS without buying the stupid expensive vmware enterprise pro?

...or do i just return the chassis?

Thanks!

[Brian Pickering]

We just implemented UCM and Unity on UCS and did not have to use VMware Enterprise+ licenses as you describe, just the Standard version without 1000V's.

QoS is done by the UCS fabric interconnect on a per vNIC basis, so I just set the policy there so that the VOIP VLAN vNIC gets the top priority as required.  We followed Brad Hedlunds guide here: http://bradhedlund.com/2010/09/15/vmware-10ge-qos-designs-cisco-ucs-nexus/

Design number #3 covers what we implemented, though we do not have vMotion, FT, or NFS on these systems, just the Mgmt for ESXi management, RealTime for the VOIP VLAN.  VMware doesn't have to know about QoS at all.

[padramas]

Terry,

UC on UCS deployment design considered the hardware features and UC software requirements

and concluded that there will be no congestion for the IP traffic until it leaves Fabric Interconnect.

So for the following traffic flow, we do not need additional QoS ( L2 COS ) configuration.

UC App > vSwitch > physical adapter > IOM > FI > upstream switch

However, if you have other virtual machines in the blade that contends for the bandwidth, then you environment might need Nexus 1000v or QoS configuration on the UCS.

Please refer following doc for additional information

http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/QoS_Design_Considerations_for_Virtual_UC_with_UCS#QoS_Design_Considerations_for_VMs_with_Cisco_UCS_B-Series_Blade_Servers

HTH

Padma