NAS connection on Cisco Nexus 5020 Switch

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macrules34

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Mar 18, 2016
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I have the following set up:

[Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Chassis w/ 5 blades(w/ ESXi 6.7)]<---->[Cisco 6248UP FI]<--->[Cisco Nexus 5020]

If I was to connect a 10GB NAS server to the Nexus 5020 would I be able to connect the blades to that 10GB NAS. I am assuming the answer is yes. But I wanted to check to make sure since this is my first Cisco UCS Blade Server infrastructure.
 

oddball

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May 18, 2018
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Yes, it should work fine.

How do you have the UCS setup? Curious as to the specs as well.

I have some blades laying around and finally purchased some chassis/FI's. I'd say 90% of our prod infra is Cisco UCS (220/240), so blades will be interesting. Not sure what we're going to do with these.
 

macrules34

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Mar 18, 2016
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Yes, it should work fine.

How do you have the UCS setup? Curious as to the specs as well.

I have some blades laying around and finally purchased some chassis/FI's. I'd say 90% of our prod infra is Cisco UCS (220/240), so blades will be interesting. Not sure what we're going to do with these.
1. I have 2 DACs from Fabric Extender A to Fabric Interconnect A and another 2 DACs to Fabric Interconnect B(same for Fabric Extender B).
2. Then I have 2 DACs from Fabric interconnect A to Nexus 5020 A and another 2 to Nexus 5020 B(same for Fabric Interconnect B)
3. The UCS chassis has 5 blades configured as follows:
4x = Dual E5-2690 CPU/32GB Ram/dual 16GB SANDISK SD cards in RAID_1 (ESXi 6.7 installed)
1x = Dual E5-2690 CPU/16GB Ram/dual 16GB SANDISK SD cards in RAID_1 (ESXi 6.7 installed)
 

oddball

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May 18, 2018
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Ok, interesting. What's the purpose of the extenders?

I have two 6120xp's and a chassis that will have 4x blades.

My goal is to have the chassis plug into the 6120xp's, and from there do a 4x10gb port channel to an Arista 7050qx. So in total I'd have 80Gbe for the chassis to external machines.
 

oddball

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May 18, 2018
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I'm not very familiar with the 6120's, but it seems I have the first 8x ports licensed, plus 4x fibre channel ports. On the FC line card I have an additional 4x ports. I'm not sure if those work or not.
 

macrules34

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Mar 18, 2016
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The Fabric Extenders are the cards in the blade chassis.

You mean from the 6120XPs to the Arista or from the Fabric Extenders to the Arista?

I know that you can't connect from the Fabric Extenders to the Arista as the 6120XPs have special software that manage the UCS blade chassis or even C series rack mounted servers.
 
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oddball

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May 18, 2018
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Ok, interesting.

I was thinking from the 6120xp's I could go to the outside world. You don't think this will work?

What's confusing to me is this. There is a tenant two racks down from me at the colo that has a blade center plugged directly into a pair of 3750s that appear to be working fine.

How do I get from the 6120 to the rest of my network?

I thought I could put a few ports into switch mode and from there connect to a different switch. This stuff is all new to me so I'm learning as I go.
 

macrules34

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Mar 18, 2016
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The Fabric extenders are the cards IN the UCS Chassis. The Fabric interconnects (in your case 6120XPs) have the special software that manages the UCS chassis and C series servers.

You can not go from the UCS chassis to another switch. But you can connect the Fabric interconnects to any 10GB switch you like.