Cisco Nexus 7000 Design Manual page 32

FlexPod Implementation and Design
Figure 10 FlexPod Distinct Uplink Design - Cisco UCS B-Series and Nexus 7000 Focus
As shown in Figure 10, the Cisco UCS 1240 VIC presents four virtual PCIe devices to the VMware ESXi
node, two virtual 10 Gigabit Ethernet NICs (vNIC) and two virtual Host Bus Adapters (vHBA). The
vSphere environment identifies these as vmnics and vmhbas respectively. The ESXi operating system is
unaware that these are virtual adapters. The result is a dual-homed ESXi node to the remaining network
from a LAN and SAN perspective.
In FlexPod the vHBA adapters use FCoE as a transport protocol across the Fabric. The ESXi node has
connections to two independent fabrics, Fabrics A and B. The Cisco UCS domain constructs distinct
virtual circuits (in this example VC 713 and VC 714) to maintain fabric separation and integrity.
FlexPod allows organizations to adjust the individual components of the system to meet their particular
scale or performance requirements. FlexPod continues this practice. One key design decision in the
Cisco UCS domain is the selection of I/O components. There are numerous combinations of I/O adapter,
fabric extenders and fabric interconnects available; so, it is important to understand the impact of these
selections on the overall flexibility, scalability and resiliency of the fabric.
VMware vSphere 5.1 on FlexPod with Nexus 7000 Using FCoE
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