Cisco UCS and VMware vSwitch design for vSphere: Another great sample design!
By Tarry Singh at 5 July, 2009, 3:42 pm
Brad’s done it again! Take a look. What I found particularly interesting was that I can easily tell my VMware engineers [or do it myself, which is a lot fun of course] to upgrade the currently VI 3.x installations to vSphere as the 10GE adapter comes as “virtual” seamless, preserving the typical 1GE VM installations for the VMs.
This diagram is a sample design of Cisco UCS running VMWare 3.5 (update 4) or vSphere 4.0 utilizing the VMWare vSwitch and Cisco’s virtualization mezzanine adapter. The Cisco adapter is a dual port 10GE Converged Network Adapter supporting Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Network Interface Virtualization (NIV). The Cisco adapter is “virtual” in the sense that this single physical adapter can be carved up into as many as 128 virtual adapters. Each virtual adapter is then exposed to the operating system as a unique physical adapter. The virtual adapters can be either Ethernet (vNIC) or Fibre Channel (vHBA). This is just one of many possible VMWare + Cisco UCS designs I will be depicting in a series of future posts.
Many VMWare 3.5 installations today use as many as (4), (8), or even (12) 1GE adapters. Because the 10GE Cisco adapter can be presented to the ESX kernel as many adapters, this allows the designer to preserve existing multi-NIC VMWare designs using the traditional VMWare vSwitch for an easy migration to 10GE attached ESX hosts.
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