High Level Cisco UCS architecture
Posted by craig 
- on September 28th, 2009 in Industry News, Tips, Virtualization | 8 Comments »
As the picture show above, it is the high level architecture which requires to run the entire UCS solution from Cisco. Not necessary every environment will require Nexus 7000, it is meant for large scale networking environment. You may go with various different switches to replace the Nexus 7000 in the picture depend on your requirement. In the current UCS release, the UCS 6100 interconnect fabric will integrate with the MDS 9000 series Fiber Channel environment or others compatible FC switches. This allow UCS blade I/O to be consolidated with CNA with 10Gbps per connection as FCoE. This had significant reduce the physical cabling requirement per blade chassis.
8 Responses
Wondering why both the Cisco UCS 6100 FI do not cross connect to SAN A and SAN B? Or this is just an example?
I will later post another topic to further discuss about the question you have. As for now, I will able to tell you that UCS 6100 is not fully function as Nexus 5000 did. Both product is behave slightly differently which Nexus 5000 is end to end FCoE but UCS 6100 is only up to the level from Chassis to switch and not until the storage level.
So can the UCS connect to the 6120 via the CNA/FCoE and then the 6120 to the 5k, and then connect to the MDS via the 5k’s FC card, or is that not supported?
Yes, it supported, the FC module on Nexus 5k is same as the MDS 9000 series for FC perspective
I talked to the Cisco Datacenter team and they specifically have said this is not supported. What I am speaking of is:
UCS -> 6120 -> 5k -> MDS
Where the UCS is doing FCoE, there is NO FC card in the 6120, but instead target resides on MDS and initiator is FCoE on UCS. Only supported configuration is initiator on UCS and target on 6120, multi level FCoE not supported at this release I am told (even though it may work), thoughts?
FCoE is within UCS you are correct. For the FC uplink from UCS 6120 will go to the FC module in Nexus 5k for SAN zoning purpose. FCoE multi hop to 5k directly is not supported in this release, therefore you need to connect the FC to FC directly from UCS 6120 to Nexus 5k on FC module in this case
Ok thanks, I was told that the FC modules in the 6120 and the 5k only support target ports, your saying you can do E/TE ports from the 6120 to the 5k, then E/TE ports from 5k to MDS, then finally connect target to MDS. That seems rather inefficient, but just curious of the E/TE’s are indeed supported like mentioned.
I am agreed with you, for most deployment today, client will usually uplink the FC connection from 6120 to their existing SAN cloud either is MDS or Brocade, which safely integrate with the existing ready infrastructure on SAN. The current release, do not support FCoE multi hop yet, there for if you have a nexus 5k in place, you can use it as the 10G network uplink for Layer 2 scale out perspective. Future roadmap will support FCoE multi hop, until that ready, you will require to uplink to the SAN switch for Fiber channel access.