Malaysia VMware Communities » Nexus 5000 http://malaysiavm.com/blog Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:50:35 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Surprise Finding on ESX Host after SAN switch outage http://malaysiavm.com/blog/surprise-finding-on-esx-host-after-san-switch-outage/ http://malaysiavm.com/blog/surprise-finding-on-esx-host-after-san-switch-outage/#comments Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:14:28 +0000 craig http://malaysiavm.com/blog/?p=1958 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.

]]> http://malaysiavm.com/blog/surprise-finding-on-esx-host-after-san-switch-outage/feed/ 2 FCoE VLAN and FC Uplinks in Cisco UCS Architecture http://malaysiavm.com/blog/fcoe-vlan-and-fc-uplinks-in-cisco-ucs-architecture/ http://malaysiavm.com/blog/fcoe-vlan-and-fc-uplinks-in-cisco-ucs-architecture/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:18:08 +0000 craig http://malaysiavm.com/blog/?p=1821 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.

]]> http://malaysiavm.com/blog/fcoe-vlan-and-fc-uplinks-in-cisco-ucs-architecture/feed/ 6 FCoE End to End Solution with Cisco Nexus 5000 and Netapp Storage http://malaysiavm.com/blog/fcoe-end-to-end-solution-with-cisco-nexus-5000-and-netapp-storage/ http://malaysiavm.com/blog/fcoe-end-to-end-solution-with-cisco-nexus-5000-and-netapp-storage/#comments Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:21:11 +0000 craig http://malaysiavm.com/blog/?p=1585 FCoE will be the next trend for most users to be adopted. Previous post I had explain about the high level architecture from Cisco UCS. Here I will describe the FCoE end to end solution which is slightly different with the UCS architecture. Please note that both architecture is similar but it does not same to each others.

fcoe2

Each server above will be connected to Nexus 5000 through CNA (Converge Network Adaptor) which provide FCoE and 10GE at the single connection. The Netapp FAS 3140 are connected to Nexus 5000 with FCoE interfaces which provide end to end solution from servers to switches, switches to storage. FC switch are not required to be in placed to allow servers communication to storage in this architecture. You can choose either NFS, FCoE or ISCSI in this configuration. The above picture is for reference and do not meant in very details as I am rush up the drawing about this post. EMC will soon officially launch the storage to support FCoE. I believe this will be the future strategy for Data Center & Storage solution. In Cisco UCS, you will still require FC switch in place as the UCS 6100 interconnect does not meant the full capable FCoE switch as Nexus 5000 did. I think the new architecture are suitable for new and clean deployment and large scale virtualization. It help to reduce the massive cabling, and achieve the throughput requirements needed by the virtualization.

fcoe3

Picture above is Traditional Network and SAN environment VS FCoE for reference purpose

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