Our Cisco 10gbE implementation consists of 2 Chassis fully populated UCS with a mix of full and half width blades. The servers are all boot from SAN with no local disks. “PALO” cards are used in all servers which allow us to do FCOE. 7 of the blades are running VMware ESX 4 (vSphere) and the rest are a mix of RedHat Linux and Windows 2008.
Storage:
The fiber switches are a redundant pair of Cisco MDS 9124s10gb ISCSI was added after the initial build. We are running Oracle with ASM in our VMware environment. This allowed for easier management of storage inside of oracle. Using ASM allowed dynamic growth of the database without having to do a lot of resizing of ext3 filesystem when expanding LUNs. We wound up with a ton of VMware RDMs (Raw Device Mappings). To remedy this issue, we have gone with 10gbE ISCSI to the EMC.
Below is a diagram of how we are currently setup.
10gbE DataCenter
Notes: Sounds like Cisco will be able to do multi-hop FCoE soon. This should remove the need of having the CX4 connected via fiber to both the 5010 and the 6120. I definitely would love feedback on this. How is everyone else implementing 10gb? Anyone considering 10gb ISCSI?
Filed under: Colocation, EMC, Hardware, Networking, RamSan, SAN (Storage Area Network)
