Since internally UCS uses FCoE to transfer FC frames, both vNICs and vHBAs use the same 10GbE uplinks to send and receive traffic. To provide network and storage connectivity to blades you create virtual NICs and virtual HBAs on each blade.
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For fibre uplinks the rule of thumb is to patch FI A to your FC Fabric A and FI B to FC Fabric B, which follows the common FC traffic isolation principle. Whether Ethernet uplinks will be individual uplinks or port channels will depend on your network topology. Every VIC adaptor is connected to both FEX modules for redundancy.įabric Interconnects are then patched to your network core and FC Fabric (if you have one). Same rule is applied to blade Virtual Interface Cards (VIC). The most common VIC 12 have 4 x 10Gb and 8 x 10Gb ports respectively and also form a port channel to the internal FEX ports. So let’s dive deep into UCS and shed some light on how VM traffic is load-balanced within the system.Įach Fabric Extender (FEX) has external and internal ports. External FEX ports are patched to FIs and internal ports are internally wired to the blade adapters. FEX 2204 has 4 external and 16 internal and FEX 2208 has 8 external and 32 internal ports.Įxternal ports are connected to FIs in powers of two: 1, 2, 4 or 8 ports per FEX and form a port channel (make sure to use “Port Channel” link grouping preference under Chassis/FEX Discovery Policy). And all these numbers may sound impressive, but unless you understand how your VMs traffic flows through UCS it’s easy to make wrong assumptions on what per VM and aggregate bandwidth you can achieve. And FEX modules on their own can have up to 8 x 10Gb Fabric Interconnect facing interfaces, which can give you up to 160Gb of bandwidth per chassis. With VIC 1280 you get 8 x 10Gb ports split between two FEX modules for redundancy. Whenever I deploy a Cisco UCS at a customer the question I get asked a lot is how traffic flows within the system between VMs running on the blades and FEX modules, FEX modules and Fabric Interconnects and finally how it’s uplinked to the network core.Ĭisco has a range of CNA cards for UCS blades.
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