Other Topologies; Deployment Guidelines; General Guidelines; Scalability And Optimal Performance Considerations - Cisco MDS 9000 series Configuration Manual

Chapter 3 Deployment Considerations
S e n d d o c u m e n t a t i o n c o m m e n t s t o m d s f e e d b a c k - d o c @ c i s c o . c o m

Other Topologies

In certain other topologies, the edge switches are connected across the WAN. In such cases, we
recommend that you do the following:
•
•
Note IOA is supported for IVR flows starting from the Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 5.0(1a).

Deployment Guidelines

This section includes the following topics:
•
•
•

General Guidelines

When you deploy IOA, consider these general configuration guidelines:
•
•

Scalability and Optimal Performance Considerations

For maximum scalability and optimal performance, follow these IOA configuration guidelines:
•
•
OL-20708-01, Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 5.0(1a)
Transition the WAN links from the edge to core switches to provide consolidation and optimal
routing services.
Deploy the IOA service in the core switches.
General Guidelines, page 3-7
Scalability and Optimal Performance Considerations, page 3-7
Resiliency Considerations, page 3-8
The IOA flows bound to the IOA interfaces on the module undergoing an upgrade will be affected.
Clustering infrastructure uses the management IP network connectivity to communicate with the
other switches. In the case of a switchover, the management IP network connectivity should be
restored quickly to preserve the cluster communication. If the management port is connected to a
Layer 2 switch, spanning-tree must be disabled on these ports. In a Cisco Catalyst 6000 Series
switch, you can implement this by configuring the spanning-tree portfast command on these ports
which will treat these ports as access or host ports.
Zoning considerations: In certain tape backup environments, a common practice is to zone every
backup server with every tape drive available to allow sharing of tape drives across all the backup
servers. For small and medium tape backup environments, this may be retained when deploying
IOA. For large backup environments, the scalability limit of number of flows in IOA must be
considered to check if the zoning configuration can be retained. Best practice for such an
environment is to create multiple tape drive pools, each with a set of tape drives and zones of only
a set of backup servers to a particular tape drive pool. This allows sharing of tape drives and
drastically reduces the scalability requirements on IOA.
Deploy IOA interfaces (MSM-18/4 or SSN-16) in the core switches in both core-edge and
edge-core-edge topologies. When multiple core switches are interconnected across the MAN or
WAN, do the following:
– Deploy the IOA interfaces equally among the core switches for high availability.
Cisco MDS 9000 Family I/O Accelerator Configuration Guide
Deployment Guidelines
3-7