Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect VSAN Setup

Referring to our Cisco UCS lab setup, we will now configure our Virtual SAN or vSAN setup. As described and well explained on The Unified Computing Blog, there are two types of vSANs that we can create. One being in the SAN Cloud and the second being in the Storage Cloud. If you create a VSAN in the Storage Cloud you would be direct connecting your Storage into the Fabric Interconnect. If you have Fiber Channel switches external to your Cisco UCS Infrastructure and you wish to connect your Fabric Interconnect to your external switches, you will use the SAN Cloud option. In this tutorial we are connecting to external fiber channel switches so we will create our VSAN under the SAN Cloud tree.

1. Open Cisco UCS manager and click on the SAN tab. Expand SAN Cloud.

2. Right click on VSANs and select Create VSAN. Give your VSAN a name, leave Default Zoning as disabled – the default, select Both Fabrics Configured Differently. We will now give Fabric A VSAN a different VSAN ID than Fabric B VSAN to isolate traffic. For the Fabric Interconnect to isolate traffic to the Chassis which travels via FCoE we need to assign two separate vlans.

3. Click Finish to conclude setting up your VSAN. Next click on Equipment Tab and expand Fabric Interconnects – Fabric Interconnect A – Expansion Module 2 – Uplink FC Ports – FC Port 1. On the right hand side select the new VSAN you created in the previous steps next to VSAN. Click Save Changes. Do this for each FC Port that you wish to connect to your fiber channel switches. Repeat the process for Fabric Interconnect B. For Uplink FC Ports that are not in use, right click each of them and select disable to avoid unnecessary alerts.

4. Before connecting the fiber cables to your fiber channel switch, you must configure the fiber channel switch port as NPIV. NPIV makes the fiber channel port act similar to a trunk port in a switch and allows fiber channel connectivity from each blade to come through the one port. Blade Server vHBA’s will be discussed later in creating Service Profiles.