Virtual Connect & Cisco Virtual Switching System (VSS) Cabling Question

[chuckk281]

Aniekan was looking to validate a configuration:

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Can we setup a Virtual Connect ànd a Cisco VSS with just one uplink port from VC to Cisco VSS switch?

Here’s the scenario. We designed this solution for a customer last year: 2 x c7000, 2 x (VC Flex-10 + VC FC) per enclosure, A/A SUS uplink, upstream Cisco switches (Production SW-x):

The above environment has been running for a year.

Note: The dashed lines do not exist, only recommended.

The customer is now ready to migrate to a single logical switch configuration (i.e. VSS). We are proposing the following cabling changes, with no changes to VC config:

 

Customer wants to do this in two steps:

1. Above configuration with only a single uplink port per VC module (i.e. without the dashed lines)
2. At some time later, add the 2^nd uplink ports (dashed lines) per VC module

Out of an abundance of caution, I want to confirm that it will work, even if it is not a best practice.

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Input from Lionel:

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This scenario is called Dual Homed Active/Active (versus Single Homed). It’s in fact a VC best practice and is usually recommended for its higher availability. It works well and is the recommended design when VSS/vPC is available. If you have a maintenance or failure (this happens sometimes when using Cisco J ) with one of the Cisco switch, Smartlink is not triggered, all server downlinks stay up, therefore no NIC failover takes place and no server SNMP alarms are sent.

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Any other comments or suggestions?

[Chris-Empired]

How did this work out in the end, have you seen this whitepaper?

http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/template.BINARYPORTLET/public/kb/docDisplay/resource.process/?javax.portlet.begCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken&javax.portlet.endCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken&javax.portlet.rid_ba847bafb2a2d782fcbb0710b053ce01=docDisplayResURL&javax.portlet.rst_ba847bafb2a2d782fcbb0710b053ce01=wsrp-resourceState%3DdocId%253Demr_na-c02843088-3%257CdocLocale%253D&javax.p...