VNX 5700 and Cisco UCS

6248UP running in fc switched mode ?

Are you able to see the WWNs for the vHBAs on the Connectivity Status in Unisphere? Or are you just referring to Unisphere not able to display the ESX server in the Virtualization section?

When Cisco vHBAs are created, then you need to reboot the blade to which they are assigned and make them do a login to the Brocade Fabric. Once zoning is done, reboot the blade again and the WWNs assigned to the zoned vHBAs should be visible on the Connectivity Status in Unisphere.

How do you have the UCS configured to connect to the Brocade? I have a similar project ahead: connect CISCO UCS with 4 blades and 2 6248UP FI to the existing VNX5500 with two Brocade 300 switches (Brocades are stand alone, no ISL).

Thanks.

Cisco FIs are connected to the Brocade switches. Make sure to confirm if the Fibre uplinks from FI are port channeled or not to avoid a mesh like connection with the fabric switch. Otherwise stick to FI Fabric A connected to SAN Fabric A and so on. The VNX ports are also split across the SAN Fabrics. Do the zoning with the vHBA WWN numbers. Let me know if I didnt state this clearly.

Thanks for your reply, Sushant. There is one thing I doubt though: I believe I cannot have port channes between the CISCO and Brocade at all, as SAN port-channel , or SAN port trunking is CISCO proprietor, correct me if I am wrong. Brocade does not support VSANs, CISCO does not support domain IDs, and Brocades only support ISLs between switches. So my dilemma is to find the best practice of connecting UCS to the EMC VNX storage via Brocade switches, and my understanding of it is that I can do it only if the FIs act as regular FC HBAs. And since I am very new to CISCo UCS, I am not sure what is the best way to configure FIs to achieve this, if it is at all possible, supported and recommended. Any ideas will be greatly appreciated.

Cisco UCS FI can be connected to Brocade FC switches so that port channels go to one fabric only. We've tried and found out that port channels to one fabric will work. So, simplistically, connect one FI port channels to one switch and it will work. Hope I answered it satisfactorily.

We are not using port channels, as Brocade does not support it, I am surprised how you were able to pull this off. We are using the FIs in the end host mode, have the vHBAs pinned to the FIs physical ports, and connected those to the Brocades. So since there NPIV involved, we have two entries for each FI physical port in the Brocade Name Server section: one 6248 physical, and the other one the vHBA assigned to the CISCO blade. However, neither CISCO, nor EMC or Brocade have best practices for zoning: do we zone both: vHBA and corresponding FI physical port to the VNX storage ports, or just the vHBAs? Do you have any info on this?

We have done zoning with the vHBA WWN not the physical port WWN. As for the first question, we know that and Brocade really doesnt support this and we were told by the vendor during the installation that the FC uplinks from FIs to our Brocade switches were port channeled. But we had tried to split the port channeled links to two FC fabrics and they were giving intermittent issues. But once we were told by him to change the FI uplinks to one FC fabric, the issue never recurred.

Hi

I know that this is an old post but we have similar configuration and we are not able to make them work. We connect and configure two 6248 interconnect to brocade 300 switches without port channels, configure VSAN and add Fc uplinks to them and uplinks are up, but when we try to create vHBA, if we add them to same VSAN as uplinks we they are placed to VSAN 4094 and ports are down for vhbas, and when we add some another VSAN to vhbas they are up but giving state waiting for external interface. Brocade switches are not in AG mode and NPIV are enabled. Can you give me some more details how you made your configuration, we basically follow steps from this guide http://realworlducs.com/cisco-ucs-fc-uplinks-brocade-fabric/#axzz2O3zFDnam, but we are unable to make this to work.

Thxs