CISCO UCS, ESXi 4.1 and Microsoft Clustering

[MitchBeaumont]

Hi,

We have an environment which include the following infrastructure:

1 x Cisco UCS Chassis with 16 B200 M2 UCS Blades

1 x NetApp 3140 with FCP licenses and 4 FCP ports

16 x ESXi Hosts

I would like to deploy a virtual Microsoft Cluster, does the UCS use RAW Fibre Channel or is all traffic sent over FCoE and if that it the case, is this a supported configuration on ESXi with Cisco UCS?

Thanks,

Mitch

[jguzmanr]

yes, no , maybe.

In all seriousness, is it FCOE?  Yes from the blade to the top of the rack switch but that should be transparent to you (and the OS).  Now from the top of the rack switch (6120?), it could be fibre or FCOE, it all depends on your environment.

[jjohnsonclt]

Hi Mitch,

I actually had a similar question as we just had a vblock put it here (which contains UCS hardware).  Even though it shows up as an FCOE hba, the transport method is Fibre Channel and not Fibre Channel over Ethernet.

See picture below:

FCOE will generally show up when using a software FCOE adapter (with a compatible NIC) as shown in Scott Lowe's blog post below.

http://blog.scottlowe.org/2011/11/29/setting-up-software-fcoe-on-vsphere-5/

Notice how the type shows up as Fibre Channel over Ethernet in the link above.

So bottom line is if your type shows up as Fibre Channel as shown in my picture above then you are supported for MS Clustering using RDMs.

Hope this helps you and some other people out there as it is a little confusing when see FCOE adapter but it is actually using Fibre Channel protocol.

Thanks

Jeff