I was busy setup the demo solution for the Cisco summit yesterday. The Demo we had were displaying the VMware, Cisco UCS, Nexus 5000, MDS 9124 & Netapp Storage Solution. 1 of the Surprise thing happened during the setup, which the power source for our MDS 9124 had been tripped during the installation yesterday. In this scenerio, all our connection to ESX host and VM were disconnected. It took us for 25 mins to recovered the power failure and the MDS Switch was back on line after that. I was thought to reboot all the ESX host as we are performing BOOT FROM SAN for all the ESX hosts that we setup. Surprise happened here, which I found all the ESX host were still continue running. I did the command uptime and check the system uptime from vcenter, it showed that the ESX host were not rebooted during the SAN connection drop from UCS to our Netapp FAS storage.
I further checked the virtual machines been power on in the ESX servers, which show all the VM were continue running without system crash or rebooted. Now I realize that the failure on SAN switch may not necessary result system crash or hung, in fact it may allow you resume the system state once the SAN switch are back online, of course, this is no guarantee assumption, just some surprise finding experienced yesterday would like to share here. Read more »
Recently I had deployed quite a number of EMC SAN with MDS Switches and Cisco UCS, I found tha FC SAN zoning might be a key consideration we may need to take a look for every deployment. This post will more focus on the MDS and UCS 6120 FC Uplink.
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.
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I manage to capture some screen shot to share over the Cisco UCS platform running with VMware vSphere 4
Summary tab it shows Cisco as the product manufacturer.
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Today I found some interesting technical details during my installation of Cisco UCS for the client. FCoE architecture are slightly different when you decide to uplink the FCoE traffic end to end to the Cisco Nexus 5000 unified fabric, or you are doing the FC uplink directly from the UCS 6120 to the MDS or SAN fabric switches. I went through the documentation and my previous round of installation, we were actually configure the LAN & SAN uplink from UCS 6120 to Nexus 5k. Therefore, in our configuration, we required to have specified FCoE VLAN which carry the FCoE traffic to reach the storage through Nexus 5000. Today, I implemented the similar configuration, but the different was the uplink configuration.
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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If you had previously installed, configured or an existing users of Cisco UCS, you may be excited with the latest firmware release from Cisco for the Unified Computing System. I had personally upgraded the firmware and tested with all the functionality, it looks much more better compare to the version 1.0. I will encourage most of you to consider the firmware upgrade which it significant enhance the interfaces and functionality for the Unified Computing System.
The new interface for the KVM also included the button to boot, reset and shutdown the server.
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