Cisco UCS Direct Attached ISCSI Storage Upstream access to Storage Array

[Nathan Armstrong]

I am in the process of performing my first UCS installation with a 5108 chassis and (4) B200 M3 blade and (2) 6248 Fabric interconnects. The plan is to connect our EMC VNX directly to the fabric interconnects as the chassis will be the only system accessing the SAN, after the migration from our current system. The fabric Interconnects will be uplinked to (2) 4500-X switches configured in a VSS. 

In my research of best practices and general deployment guidelines I noticed the requirement to create (2) separate iscsi VLANs one for Fabric A and one for fabric B. I'm guessing this requirement is because of the lack STP as the FI's are configured in EHM, but I haven't been able to find an exact answer. Any insight would be appreciated. 

My primary question and concern is that if I create a second ISCSI VLAN on our 4500-X and then create both of these VLAN's on FI A & B  will I be able to attach the SAN to the UCS as well as to our old VMware cluster (We are migrating our 5.5 environment from an HP Compute and storage system to UCS) to facilitate the storage vMotions?

[Walter Dey · Accepted solution]

I noticed the requirement to create (2) separate iscsi VLANs one for Fabric A and one for fabric B

Are you referring to

https://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/technical-documentation/h8229-vnx-vmware-tb.pdf

p 36

If I understand your question correctly: can a host attached to 4500 (connected to UCS FI), access Luns on the VNX, which is directly connected to UCS Fabric Interconnect by means of appliance ports (FI in EHM) ? YES ! I would accept this for a migration, but not forever, because it means transit traffic on the Fabric Interconnect.

[Nathan Armstrong]

Thanks for the clarification,I assumed so but want to validate first.