Flex. Pod Datacenter with Cisco ACI and VMware v. Sphere 6. 0 U1 Design Guide.

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Industry trends indicate a vast data center transformation toward shared infrastructure and cloud computing. Business agility requires application agility, so IT teams need to provision applications in hours instead of months. Resources need to scale up (or down) in minutes, not hours. To simplify the evolution to a shared cloud infrastructure based on an application driven policy model, Cisco and Net.

App have developed this solution called VMware v. Sphere. Cisco ACI in the data center is a holistic architecture with centralized automation and policy- driven application profiles that delivers software flexibility with hardware performance. The audience for this document includes, but is not limited to; sales engineers, field consultants, professional services, IT managers, partner engineers, and customers who want to take advantage of an infrastructure built to deliver IT efficiency and enable IT innovation. The following design elements distinguish this version of Flex. Pod from previous models. This portfolio includes, but is not limited to the following items.

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The support alliance between Net. App and Cisco provides customers and channel services partners with direct access to technical experts who collaborate with cross vendors and have access to shared lab resources to resolve potential issues. Flex. Pod supports tight integration with virtualized and cloud infrastructures, making it the logical choice for long- term investment. Flex. Pod also provides a uniform approach to IT architecture, offering a well- characterized and documented shared pool of resources for application workloads. Flex. Pod delivers operational efficiency and consistency with the versatility to meet a variety of SLAs and IT initiatives, including. Flex. Pod can scale up for greater performance and capacity (adding compute, network, or storage resources individually as needed), or it can scale out for environments that require multiple consistent deployments (rolling out additional Flex.

Pod stacks). The reference architecture covered in this document leverages the Cisco Nexus 9. One of the key benefits of Flex. Pod is the ability to maintain consistency at scale. Each of the component families shown (Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus, and Net. App FAS) offers platform and resource options to scale the infrastructure up or down, while supporting the same features and functionality that are required under the configuration and connectivity best practices of Flex. Pod. Flex. Pod addresses four primary design principles: scalability, flexibility, availability, and manageability. These architecture goals are as follows.

Makes sure that services are accessible and ready to use. Addresses increasing demands with appropriate resources. Provides new services or recovers resources without requiring infrastructure modification. Facilitates efficient infrastructure operations through open standards and APIs. It has been addressed in other collateral, benchmarking, and solution testing efforts; this design guide validates the functionality. The Cisco Nexus 9.

Nx. OS standalone mode and Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) fabric mode. In standalone mode, the switch performs as a typical Nexus switch with increased port density, low latency and 4. G/1. 00. G connectivity. In fabric mode, the administrator can take advantage of Cisco ACI. Cisco Nexus 9. 00. Flex. Pod design with Cisco ACI consists of Cisco Nexus 9. Application Policy Infrastructure Controllers (APICs).

Cisco ACI delivers a resilient fabric to satisfy today's dynamic applications. ACI leverages a network fabric that employs industry proven protocols coupled with innovative technologies to create a flexible, scalable, and highly available architecture of low- latency, high- bandwidth links. This fabric delivers application instantiations using profiles that house the requisite characteristics to enable end- to- end connectivity. The ACI fabric is designed to support the industry trends of management automation, programmatic policies, and dynamic workload provisioning. The ACI fabric accomplishes this with a combination of hardware, policy- based control systems, and closely coupled software to provide advantages not possible in other architectures.

The Cisco ACI fabric consists of three major components. The ACI Fabric Architecture is outlined in Figure 2. The software controller, APIC, is delivered as an appliance and three or more such appliances form a cluster for high availability and enhanced performance.

APIC is responsible for all tasks enabling traffic transport including. The fabric can still forward traffic even when communication with the APIC is lost. APIC provides both a command- line interface (CLI) and graphical- user interface (GUI) to configure and control the ACI fabric. APIC also exposes a northbound API through XML and Java. Script Object Notation (JSON) and an open source southbound API. Flex. Pod with ACI is designed to be fully redundant in the compute, network, and storage layers.

There is no single point of failure from a device or traffic path perspective. The Net. App storage controllers, Cisco Unified Computing System, and Cisco Nexus 9. Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP). Port channeling is a link aggregation technique offering link fault tolerance and traffic distribution (load balancing) for improved aggregate bandwidth across member ports.

In addition, the Cisco Nexus 9. Port Channel (v. PC) capabilities. Note in the Figure above that v. PC peer links are no longer needed. The Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects and Net. App FAS controllers benefit from the Cisco Nexus v. PC abstraction, gaining link and device resiliency as well as full utilization of a non- blocking Ethernet fabric.

Compute: Each Fabric Interconnect (FI) is connected to both the leaf switches and the links provide a robust 4. Gb. E connection between the Cisco Unified Computing System and ACI fabric. Figure 4 illustrates the use of v. PC enabled 1. 0Gb. E uplinks between the Cisco Nexus 9. Cisco UCS FI. Additional ports can be easily added to the design for increased bandwidth as needed. Each Cisco UCS 5.

FIs using a pair of ports from each IO Module for a combined 4. G uplink. Current Flex. Pod design supports Cisco UCS C- Series connectivity both for direct attaching the Cisco UCS C- Series servers into the FIs or by connecting Cisco UCS C- Series to a Cisco Nexus 2. Fabric Extender hanging off of the Cisco UCS FIs. The Fabric Extenders are used when using many UCS C- Series servers and the number of available ports on the Fabric Interconnects becomes a concern. Flex. Pod designs mandate Cisco UCS C- Series management using Cisco UCS Manager to provide a uniform look and feel across blade and standalone servers. Storage: The ACI- based Flex.

Pod design is an end- to- end IP- based storage solution that supports SAN access by using i. SCSI. The solution provides a 1. Gb. E fabric that is defined by Ethernet uplinks from the Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects and Net. App storage devices connected to the Cisco Nexus switches. Optionally, the ACI- based Flex. Pod design can be configured for SAN boot or application LUN access by using Fibre Channel (FC) or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCo.

E). FC/FCo. E access is provided by directly connecting the Net. App FAS controller to the Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects with separate ports as shown in Figure 5. Also note that although FC and FCo. E are supported, only FCo. E connections to storage are validated in this CVD.

Figure 5 shows the initial storage configuration of this solution as a two- node high availability (HA) pair running clustered Data ONTAP in a switchless cluster configuration. Storage system scalability is easily achieved by adding storage capacity (disks and shelves) to an existing HA pair, or by adding more HA pairs to the cluster or storage domain. For NAS- only environments, it allows 1. HA pairs or 2. 4 nodes to form a logical entity.