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Excerpt: I ran into an issue that presented itself two different ways, each at a different customer. I posted a while back about a customer that wanted to use only a single Nexus 5000, since that was all that was available. I wanted to bundle all four CNA ports on the Netapp storage array to the Netapp SAN. However, after I created this port channel and bound the virtual fibre channel (VFC) interface to it, the VFC interface would not come up. Proper FCoE design on Cisco Nexus 5000 dictates that each virtual fibre channel (VFC) interface runs it’s FCoE traffic over no…
Important FCoE Considerations – Cisco Nexus and Netapp
August 21, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Scripted Flexpod Provisioning – First Impressions
August 16, 2012 by 1 Comment
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Excerpt: I had the opportunity this week to ascertain the feasibility of automating the provisioning of a full Flexpod. For reference, this is considering a “vanilla” Flexpod build: Pair of Nexus 5ks Pair of Cisco UCS 6ks with chassis Netapp running ONTAP 7-Mode (I tested on FAS6070) Note that this also makes a few assumptions about the build. FC via Nexus 5000, no MDS No existing vCenter integration or storage migration So – pretty much a green field Flexpod build, pretty close to the specs laid out in the design guide. Even such a standard, relatively simple Flexpod build can take 80 hours or more. Excluding the initial…
KIClet: Sub-Optimal Fibre Channel Path Selection
July 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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Excerpt: The SAN I’m currently working with connects a pair of Netapp FAS3270 filers running ONTAP 8.0.2 7-Mode. If you’re running VMware ESXi in your environment in front of a Fibre Channel SAN, path selection is discovered more or less in a first-come-first-served fashion. I got this message on my Netapp filer: FCP Partner Path Misconfigured: Host I/O access through a non-primary and non-optimal path was detected. Since the LUNs mounted by ESXi were residing on the A-side filer, the paths going through the B-side filer would just be sent over the partner link to the A-side, which is less efficient than going directly through A….
Windows Server 2008 R2 Boot From SAN on Cisco UCS
April 25, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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Excerpt: For those that have worked with any type of blade server system, you know that boot from SAN is just about the coolest thing since sliced bread. Cisco UCS makes this even cooler by integrating with the service profile concept, allowing for stateless compute provisioning across the board. I’ve done boot from SAN many times, but never with Windows. I’ve primarily used ESXi4.1 or ESXi5.0 stored on a Fibre Channel LUN, then the VMs are stored in either a FC or NFS datastore. Running a BFS for baremetal Windows isn’t something I’d explored yet. So the first thing I do is get…
A Quick and Dirty Netapp SnapMirror
April 19, 2012 by 9 Comments
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Excerpt: Snapmirror is a Netapp feature that’s pretty commonly used to copy data from one system to another. You can copy volumes, or qtrees. It’s also very useful in Disaster Recovery plans, since volumes can be incrementally backed up to an offsite location. I have a VMWare vCenter instance running on Cisco UCS that utilizes a Fibre Channel LUN to store VM templates. It’s pretty large, since it holds templates for a variety of operating systems. I was tasked with getting these VMware templates to be accessible in a completely isolated system in another part of the datacenter. None of the physical…
Netapp CNA Link Redundancy with a Single Nexus Switch
February 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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Excerpt: I ran into a configuration recently where I had a Netapp storage array with the UTA cards installed, so there two CNA ports on each filer for a total of 4 ports. However, instead of a dual-switch design, there was only a single Nexus 5000, and therefore, no vPC configuration. I needed to achieve some level of redundancy on an interface level, but ran into some problems which I’ll discuss. My topology looks like this: As you can see, there’s only one Nexus 5K, shown at the bottom. The two Netapp FAS3240 filers are connected via each Converged Network Adapter to a…
Some Out-of-Box NetApp Tweak Suggestions
February 1, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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Excerpt: It’s interesting to me to see the differences in infrastructure products as it pertains to out of the box, or default configuration. Take for instance, the relationship between a firewall and a switch. Your average firewall is configured “closed”, meaning that if you want to allow anything, you have to explicitly allow that certain type of traffic. If you do not, it is not allowed. A switch, on the other hand, is configured to be functional above all, out of the box. Even high-end switches, with all the advanced switching feature sets that they have, are configured out-of-box to start switching…
