Cisco Nexus 1000V is a enhance virtual distributed virtual switch which integrate to the VMware vSphere 4. With Cisco Nexus 1000V, you will contain VSM and VEM, which VSM will be the virtual appliances that host the management of Nexus 1000V, and VEM will be installed on each ESX host that been connected to the Nexus 1000V.  I will not go in too details about Nexus 1000V in this post as my intention is to clear up the confusion on the VN-Link meant by Cisco.

6 months ago, this new term had come to my career while someone had claimed that the VN-Link will allow virtual machine to direct interact to the physical IO devices on the PCI-E without hypervisor in place. Well, this features had been included in VMware for quite some times in vSphere 4 by using the functionality call VMDirectPath I/O. But while doing this, you will lose the functionality of VMotion, and most users will not go for this due to the limitation on VMotion. Since this is new, no right or wrong, I decided to leave it for a while and further research to understand it.

After many round of discussion and reading on the blog and white paper, finally I have the answer I want now. VN-Link is the product name for a family of products, does not specifically refer to any one product so forget the idea of hardware vs. software implementation, etc.  Think of the Nexus family of switches: 1000v, 2000, 4000, 5000, 7000.  All different products solving different design goals but are components of the Data Center 3.0 portfolio from Cisco.  In VN-Link it contains Cisco Nexus 1000V, Hypervisor Bypass with Direct Path I/O, Pass Through Switching, Virtual Interface card & VNTag. If you had done the administration or implementation on Cisco UCS, Nexus 1000V, Nexus 5000 & 2000, you should familar with all these term that I mentioned here.

For more details information, I will recommend the Unified Computing Blog who had done the good explanation to described further in details for the VN-Link technology.

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Cisco UCS interconnect fabric switches are utilizing FC uplink to allow the Cisco Unified Computing System to get access to the SAN fabric environment.

Here is the architecture diagram you can refer to. In order to make this work, 1st requirement will be the NPIV.

What is NPIV? ( N_Port ID Virtualization or NPIV is a Fibre Channel facility allowing multiple N_Port IDs to share a single physical N_Port)

For more details information, you can refer to the URL HERE

Once the NPIV had been enabled on the SAN Switch, you just need to enable the FC uplink from the Interconnect Fabric by the UCS Manager or CLI mode. Now you should able to see the WWN login from the command prompt, device manager or fabric manager. Any 1 of the method will work. To simplify the setup for the UCS, you can consider port base zoning or WWN zoning. I had done both setup before with VSAN in place, it looks similar to me except from security stand point. If we are only connecting host and storage via the SAN, the port base zoning with the Storage host group features should able to manage the host group to access the correct LUN. If there are additional devices such as tape library, this may create another layer of confusion. At the end, I configured all the zoning base on WWN id, which are still the best configuration in most environment today to prevent any device, host or target conflict in the fabric environment. Not to say the port base zoning will not work, it just the WWN base is more secure and reliable.

I had done the test with the port base zoning and end up, the backup device will be visible even from my ESX server which run on top of Cisco UCS. This is not cool

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This new setup are included with 10 G Ethernet uplink from UCS 6120 to Catalyst 6509 through Fiber, and utilizing FC Uplinks from UCS 6120 to MDS 9124. In my test, I removed the VLAN that I created purposely for FCoE, and found that there are no impact to the configuration.  I had confirmed with the support guys that if you are doing an uplink with FC from UCS 6100 to MDS, you will not require to tag the specified VLAN that created for the VSAN in the configuration.

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The new interface for the KVM also included the button to boot, reset and shutdown the server.

For the UCS web URL, you can also directly log in to the IP KVM and launch the specify Physical Server without logging into the UCS admin console. This will allow the users or administrator which do not require full admin access to the UCS Manager, to access the server console with an alternative method. To achieve this, it will recommend the IP KVM managment IP pools should be accessible from the LAN network.

With the new firmware release, I also found that the process to acssociate and disassociate the services profiles had been enhanced. The progress of the task execution are more accurate which can be easily view from the FSM tab for each of the item from the UCS Manager.

I also attached another few pictures that I previously setup for another project in Shanghai.

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Front view of the 2 UCS Chassis.

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There are video on the web which show you how to setup the Nexus 1000V in 8 mins video, which is greatly reliable. You can refer to the link here to find out more. Further that, you will no longer require to register and redeem the license as tough as previously does. Once you setup the Nexus 1000V, it will automatically come with the license applied which valid for 60 days, and you can enjoy your sweet time to wait for the final license key and re-apply it. Since the Nexus 1000V come with the http web base, I am not sure why Cisco had not consider to allow us to apply the license key file via the web rather than the messy process of transferring the license file into the nexus 1000v with certain CLI command. To simplify this, will definitely help the administrator to speed up the work.

There are 3 option of installing the VEM, which via VCLI, ESX console or VMware update manager. My setup today are without internet connection, therefore I went for both vcli and SSH protocol and I found that the easiest way are using vCLI. You can download the vCLI from here which is free via VMware official website. A lot of users are not adopting to Nexus 1000V today, but if you ask whether there are a need for it, my answer will be yes. For the users who had been virtualized their environment for years may realized the challenges been faced on the normal vswitch or dvswitch, and Nexus 1000V will greatly address all the challenges we have on the virtual environment.

We also tested the active standby architecture for Nexus 1000V in the VMware environment and it greatly fail over as it promised. Not too much hassle require to configure this, just as simple as 10 mins job follow the video here. Personally I will be glad to see more improvement from Cisco to further enhance and simplify the installation process and configuration which will greatly bring more value to the customer for planning and implementation moving forward.

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To enjoy the benefit of stateless computing, you must ensure that the server or system are boot from SAN. We simulated the blade failure during the demo, and we re-associated the service profile to any of the available blade within the UCS cluster, and power it on. The entire servers are back online which maintain all the necessary system state and no re-configuration was required include LAN, SAN, Hostname and etc. The entire process took less than 20 mins and the system was back online. We simulated few round with different blade but same images and profiles, and it work exactly as it promises. Stateless computing are the key features which meant for the IT administrator to minimize the system down time in the event of hardware failure & system compatibilities.

If you have a hardware failure on the current blade server, which the hardware will be replaced in the next 4 hours,  nothing much could be done on the system administration to resume the production system without stateless computing. With stateless computing in place, you can easily shutdown any of your test & Development systems, and transfer the service profiles to allow the production system back online in less than 20 mins. This will be helpful to improve the SLA and system uptime in the event of hardware failure.

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Beside unified storage, we are looking forward for unified computing system for the server compute platform too. Cisco had moved ahead of their competitor to bring this to the world and it is 1 fo the great platform that get attraction and adoption worldwide. Cisco UCS or Nexus 5000 both provide the unified I/O capabilities and allow us to transform the data center architecture today. Beside consolidating LAN and SAN into 1 with FCoE, the more interesting capabilities that get attention by us are the switching capacity.

The Nexus 5000 or UCS 6140 switches supported up to 1.14 Tbits/s and this number are more than enough to consolidate all the necessary traffic it need to be delivered by the LAN & SAN. If you have this solution in place today and well integrated with the unified storage as well as the core networking environment, you can easily choose to run NAS, ISCSI or FC through the same Unified frabics and Unified Storage you have. As everyone know, there are no perfect solution or protocol for every scenario, but now, you will able to choose the right protocol for every different computing system, application and database requirement without implementing separate ISCSI, NFS or FC physical infrastructure.

This is a nice picture to summarize the description about Unified Platform which I get it from http://viewyonder.com

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Once I unpacked the UCS Chassis from the box, it took me less than 10 mins to slot in 5 units of the B200M1 with 48GB Memory , 2x Intel 5540 and 2 x 146 SAS Local HDD each. At the same time, I did try to open up the casing for 1 of the blade,. it took me less than 1 min to do so. Came to the cabling part, usually we spent a lot of effort for cable management on Gigabits Ethernet and FC cabling, for Cisco UCS, maximum 8 cables per chassis for IO uplink. Of course, I do not require to over provision in this case, I managed to connect 4 FCoE connections from the chassis to the UCS 6120 Cluster for demo purpose and it is more than enough to handle the IO requirement for the showcase.

Well, when I move the box from my office to 2 different location in my country for event, it take me less than 1 hour to re-setup everything and boot up all the physical and virtual machine within the Cisco UCS.  It is really a great design to simplify a hardware setup and configuration. Guess what, I do have different engineer who are non server background that help me to re-setup and they were impressed with the design and took less than 5 mins to understand the architecture after my explanation.

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Please read the full details from the official link here.

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