Vsphere with Cisco UCS

[RaymondG]

Hi

We are about to deploy vmware on UCS and I would like to know any recommendations/issues/problems that others have.

How do you set up your switching?  do you give one nic to vswitch0 for SC and vMotion, and the other to the networks?  Do you team them on one switch and just make separate port groups for everything? 

Does anyone perfer BFS over local drives?  why/why not?

Does anyone else think the UCSm is necessarily over complicated or is it just me?

does anyone use the nexusV instead of the vDS?

any extra input would be appreciated also.

Thanks

[sflanders]

Hey Raymond,

It comes down to preference, experience, and hardware. Based on your questions I would assume you have half-width blades without the Palo cards. I assume this because it seems like you only have two NICs to play with. Based on this assumption, either option of configuration works. Best practice to date has been to separate management and VM traffic onto different vSwitches and since UCS will handle NIC failover for you it is possible to configure a single NIC to a management vSwitch and a single NIC to a separate VM vSwitch and still have redundancy. Personally, I have decided to combine and simply leverage separate port groups, but the chose is yours.

UCSM has a learning curve, but once you get use to it I think you will find it is not that bad.

For vDS versus 1000v see: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11114

Hope this helps!