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Re: Active/Active Trunk across all 6 ports?

 
mkejdo
New Member

Active/Active Trunk across all 6 ports?

I've been banging my head against the side of this enclosure trying to get this to work.

Here's my scenario:
I have a c7000, OA firmware 3.21, VC firmware 3.17. This is a brand new enclosure.
I've got Flex-10 modules in bays 1 and 2. I've got 6 uplinks in each going to a Cisco Nexus 2232PP Fabric extender in mid rack, then up to the Nexus 5548p at the top of the rack.

All 6 ports are in a single trunk. While Im not the network guy around here, I am the blade guy around here. What I want to do is have an active/active setup using all 6 ports on each module, and I am also constrained to tunneling VLAN tags, which we will configure them at the host level.

Should I define the network as all 6 ports on one interconnect be one network and the other interconnect as another network?

I've tried a number of configurations and what I'm getting only one port of each module active.

I know it sounds like overkill to do it this way, but we are capacity planning for the future, and since we can do it, we might as well is what management thinks.

What would be the best case scenario, given my restrictions?

1 REPLY 1
Stevem
Frequent Advisor

Re: Active/Active Trunk across all 6 ports?


@mkejdo wrote:

I've been banging my head against the side of this enclosure trying to get this to work.

Here's my scenario:
I have a c7000, OA firmware 3.21, VC firmware 3.17. This is a brand new enclosure.
I've got Flex-10 modules in bays 1 and 2. I've got 6 uplinks in each going to a Cisco Nexus 2232PP Fabric extender in mid rack, then up to the Nexus 5548p at the top of the rack.

All 6 ports are in a single trunk. While Im not the network guy around here, I am the blade guy around here. What I want to do is have an active/active setup using all 6 ports on each module, and I am also constrained to tunneling VLAN tags, which we will configure them at the host level.

Should I define the network as all 6 ports on one interconnect be one network and the other interconnect as another network?

I've tried a number of configurations and what I'm getting only one port of each module active.

I know it sounds like overkill to do it this way, but we are capacity planning for the future, and since we can do it, we might as well is what management thinks.

What would be the best case scenario, given my restrictions?


In answer to the main question, YES.  If you want what VC considers to be Active/Active, then, yes.  Create TWO vNet Tunnels (enable the tunnel check box), one with ALL 6 links from Bay 1 and another with ALL 6 links from Bay 2, (Also, you could use 7 uplinks per side if you wanted as with this design you likely won't be using the cross connect for internal traffic, but make sure at lease one cross connect remains available).

 

As to the second question, the issue with only one link becoming active, is likely because the network folks have not put the 6 FEX ports into a LAG.  Have them make sure that all six links from Bay 1 are in a LAG and the 6 FEX ports connected to Bay 2 are in a different LAG.  Ensure all ports are configured for all supported VLANs.  Once the ports are configured correctly, all links will be active.

 

Also, you can go into the "Interconnect" module in the lower left pane of the VC menu and drill down to see that the current links will have different LAG IDs, once the switch LAG is configured correctly, the VC LAG IDs will match on all links.  (Note: the LAG ID you see in the VC UI is unique to that VC LAG and is not the same ID that would be used at the switch).