If you are new to vSphere or to the professional VMware world, you might not know about ProfessionalVMware.com. This is a site where VMware admins, pros, and newbies all come together to learn in community, and the forum is called the #vBrownBag.
Last week I presented about 90 minutes focused on the Cisco UCS exam portions of the CCNP-DC:
Last week I presented about 90 minutes focused on the Cisco UCS exam portions of the CCNP-DC:
- 642-999 Implementing UCS (and)
- 642-998 Designing UCS (or) 642-035 Troubleshooting UCS
What Exactly is FEX?
In my experience, and in regards to the exam, it is best to think of a Fabric Extender, or FEX, as a category of products. In my early years with UCS, I found people referring to FEXes in all kinds of ways, and it was really confusing. This should help to clear that up:
Cisco | FEX Terminology (image from CiscoLive!)
So when you are prepping for the CCNP-DC exam, you want to make sure you keep the product lines distinct within the category of FEX offerings; sometimes you will need to think of a FEX as a 2232TP extension of a Nexus 5k, sometimes you will need to think of it as an 2208XP IOM in a UCS chassis, and sometimes you will need to think of it as virtual adapters within a host—adapter FEX (such as a VIC 1240 presenting for DirectPath I/O in vSphere) or VM-FEX (dynamic vNICs connecting directly to a vDS through UCSM integration to vCenter).
Licensing Fabric Interconnects
This topic came up a lot, primarily because it is different than other Cisco product offerings. The easiest way to think of licensing the Fabric Interconnects is as a port enablement license. Here's the breakdown of how it works:
| Product 6248UP 6296UP E16UP (Expansion) | Ports Total 32 (48 max) 48 (96 max) 16 | Ports Licensed 12 16 8 | License SKU UCS-LIC-10GE UCS-LIC-10GE UCS-LIC-10GE |
You can see it is pretty straightforward. One thing that I have found in optimizing my configs is that often it is better for ROI to buy an expansion module and get 8 additional ports automatically than it would be to buy 8 port licenses—but you have to determine that in each individual scenario.
Native Fiber Channel and FCoE Tips
We talked a bit about native fiber channel, as we are seeing a lot of customers doing multihop FCoE in order to connect to legacy 8Gbps Fiber-Channel arrays (though more and more arrays are coming with unified ports these days, such as the newly minted NetApp FAS2500 series). Here are a couple of tips.
When you configure your WWNN and WWPN pools, use a fabric identifier in the hexadecimal address. The WWPN is a standardized notation, and the first three octets should not be modified as they are vendor-specific (underlined below). The last three, however, can be modified to whatever scheme you prefer, such as the one below:
Finally, because native Fiber-Channel (2/4/8Gbps) ports must be selected in a contiguous group from the right-side of a chassis or module, it is often desirable (thanks Trevor for mentioning this—I had forgot about it!) to put native FC ports on the expansion module, since a reboot is required to make the changes take effect. If you do this, only the module will reinitialize, and the rest of the Fabric Interconnect will remain operational.
When you configure your WWNN and WWPN pools, use a fabric identifier in the hexadecimal address. The WWPN is a standardized notation, and the first three octets should not be modified as they are vendor-specific (underlined below). The last three, however, can be modified to whatever scheme you prefer, such as the one below:
- Template: 00:25:B5:[POD#]:[CHASSIS#][FABRIC]:[HBA#]
- Fabric A: 00:25:B5:01:2A:00
- Fabric B: 00:25:B5:03:1B:01
Finally, because native Fiber-Channel (2/4/8Gbps) ports must be selected in a contiguous group from the right-side of a chassis or module, it is often desirable (thanks Trevor for mentioning this—I had forgot about it!) to put native FC ports on the expansion module, since a reboot is required to make the changes take effect. If you do this, only the module will reinitialize, and the rest of the Fabric Interconnect will remain operational.
UCS Emulator and Importing Production Configs
UCS Platform Emulator or UCSPE is a sandbox tool for those learning UCS for the first time, and for those wishing to be able to emulate an environment. We talked about downloading an installing it—here's a great post from my friend Eric Wright on UCSPE download and setup.
Cisco UCSPE | Home Screen
You can import only config-all or logical/system backup files into UCSPE; you cannot import full-state backups (for obvious reasons). Be sure to disable Redirect HTTP to HTTPS under Admin | Communications Management | Communications Services before import to avoid getting an HTTP 302 error (not found).
Traffic Monitoring: HIF and NIF Ports
The last thing we discussed was Host Interface (HIF) ports and Network Interface (HIF) ports. These are Cisco's terminology for describing the southbound (host-facing) or northbound (network-facing ports within the UCS fabric.
ciscoucs-01# connect iom 1
ciscoucs-01# show platform software redwood sts
Cisco UCS | Show HIF/NIF Port Mapping (image from CiscoLive!)
Once you have determined the ports you would like more detail on, you can run the following command to get more detailed out (than you probably wanted):
ciscoucs-01# show platform software redwood sts rmon hif0
ciscoucs-01# show platform software redwood sts rmon nif3
Cisco UCS | Show HIF/NIF Port Statistics (image from CiscoLive!)
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