vSphere 6 on Cisco UCS / NetApp NFS Datastore Redundancy

[fort_sphere]

Hello,

I am currently deploying a number of vSphere 6 hosts on Cisco UCS blade class servers attached to NFS datastores running on NetApp cluster-mode filers. My question is regarding storage redundancy and path selection to the NFS datastores.

Here is the current configuration:

2 x NetApp filers with each with 1 x 10Gbps connection to UCS Fabric Interconnect A and Fabric Interconnect B

UCS Chassis with 2 x 10Gbps connections to UCS Fabric Interconnect A and Fabric Interconnect B

vSphere 6 Enterprise Plus hosts with 1 x NFS vmkernel port with 1 x vNIC connected to Fabric Interconnect A and 1 x vNIC connected to Fabric Interconnect B (Currently the vNIC on FI-A is set to Active Uplink and the vNIC on FI-B is set to Standby)

Currently the active path on the NetApp is the 10Gbps connection to FI-A and as long as the vSphere host NFS vmkernel port is using the vNIC connected to FI-A we are all good. But as soon as I remove the vNIC connected to FI-A or reverse the failover order so that the vNIC connected to FI-B is active and the vNIC connected to FI-A is standby the host loses connectivity to the NFS datastores as the NetApp and ESXi hosts are not communicating through the same Fabric Interconnect. With most enterprise class switches I believe that you would have a virtual port channel between both switches which would deal with this, but because we are using the Fabric Interconnects to connect the vSphere hosts and storage we run into this issue because they do not support vPC.

Has anyone else tried this type of implementation and has a successful configuration that can address the path selection issue.

Any help with this would be appreciated.

Thank you!

[Nick_Andreev]

Are you using Appliance Port type on UCS FIs for NetApp links? If not, I highly suggest reading this Cisco whitepaper: "Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Storage Connectivity Options and Best Practices with NetApp Storage", especially the section "NAS and UCS Appliance Ports".

[fort_sphere]

We are using the Appliance Ports on the Fabric Interconnects, but we are having issues during a failover of the NetApp to the opposite FI than the UCS hosts are using.

At this point we are looking at implementing some Nexus switches so that we can let them do all of the switching and the NetApp ports can be cabled up to them to provide better networking support.

I will give that document a shot and see if it can help us with the issues we are experiencing.

Thank you!

[vangoose]

The appliance port is only supported for block storage. File storage has to be connected to uplink switches.

[Nick_Andreev]

Appliance ports are used for any IP storage, whether it's iSCSI or NFS/CIFS. Do you have any source you can provide, that proves otherwise?