UCS boot from iSCSI with Nexus

[dmweimer52]

I see quite a bit of information about directly connecting the Nimble Storage to the UCS Fabric Interconnects and using "Appliance Ports" but I see very little or nothing about doing boot from iSCSI with a Nexus 5k in between the UCS and the Nimble. Does anyone have any step-by-step instructions they can provide?

[pflammer23 · Accepted solution]

Hello Mark,

there are two threads on this community about boot from SAN with UCS:

https://connect.nimblestorage.com/thread/1282

iSCSI Booting UCS blade/rack server with Nimble Storage

It shouldn't matter whether you're using Nexus 5K or attach the Nimble to the FIs.

However, there's something that changed (with 2.X firmware) since the two above were posted.

Where it says "obtain the target discovery IP" you now have to use the Data IPs of the array, instead of the arrays discovery IP.

Hope this helps.

Pierre

[#3]

Hey Pierre...

We boot our UCS off of our Nimble CS240s...and I use the iSCSI discovery IP and not the actual Data IPs.  We are running 2.1.4.0x.

Are you saying that this shouldn't be working, or is simply not best practice?

Thanks

-Scott

[pflammer23]

Hello Scott,

it took me a while to reply as I was checking with support as well.

Here are the best practices:

Use the DISCOVERY IP for each subnet for boot from SAN.

Anything prior to NOS 2.1.x - Use DATA IP to boot from SAN.

Kind Regards,

Pierre