Tegile Intelligent Flash Array & Cisco UCS: Configuration ...

1 Tegile Intelligent Flash Array & Cisco UCS: Configuration guide Harrison Waller | Tegile Systems Revision January 13, 2015 Page: 2 Copyright Copyright 2015 Tegile Systems , ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Notice: No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or stored in a database or retrieval system for any purpose, without the express written permission of Tegile Systems (hereinafter referred to as Tegile ). Tegile reserves the right to make changes to this document at any time without notice and assumes no responsibility for its use.

2 Tegile products and services only can be ordered under the terms and conditions of Tegile 's applicable agreements. All of the features described in this document may not be available currently. Refer to the latest product announcement or contact your local Tegile sales office for information on feature and product availability. This document includes the latest information available at the time of publication. Tegile is a trademark of Tegile Systems in the United States, and other countries. All other trademarks, service marks, and company names in this document are properties of their respective owners.

3 Tegile Systems, Inc. | 7999 Gateway Blvd. | Suite 120 | Newark | CA | 94560 | (855) 483-4453 Page: 3 Table of Contents Copyright .. 2 Introduction .. 5 Tegile Overview .. 5 UCS Storage Connectivity Overview .. 6 Fibre Channel with UCS and Tegile Array .. 8 UCS Fibre Channel in NPV Mode .. 8 UCS and FC Direct Connect (Switching Mode) .. 9 Fibre Channel Configuration .. 10 UCS Configuration for End Host (NPV) Mode .. 10 UCS Configuration for FC Direct Connect .. 11 Ensure that FI is in FC Switch mode .. 11 Create VSANs.

4 11 Set FI ports to FC Storage Mode .. 13 Zone WWPNs .. 13 Boot from SAN Configuration .. 14 iscsi with UCS and Tegile Arrays .. 16 Tegile Transparent iscsi Failover .. 16 UCS Direct Connect with iscsi .. 16 iscsi Configuration .. 16 General Tips for iscsi vNICs .. 16 UCS iscsi Boot and Fabric Failover .. 17 iscsi Configuration with Direct Connect .. 18 Tegile Array iscsi Configuration .. 18 Page: 4 UCS Configuration .. 22 NFS with UCS and Tegile Arrays .. 27 UCS with Direct Connect NFS Using Appliance Ports .. 27 Failure Scenarios to Consider.

5 29 Fabric Interconnect failure .. 30 IOM or all uplinks to FI failure .. 30 Appliance port failure .. 31 Tegile Array controller failure .. 32 NFS Configuration .. 32 Direct Connect .. 33 Tegile Array NFS Configuration .. 33 UCS NFS Configuration .. 34 General Configuration Settings of UCS .. 34 Configure UCS Port-Channel .. 35 Chassis to FI Port-Channel .. 35 FI to uplink switch Port-Channel .. 36 Switch and End Host mode .. 37 Appliance Port Configuration .. 38 OS Images and drivers .. 41 Conclusion .. 41 References .. 41 Page: 5 Introduction This paper will provide an overview of the various storage features, connectivity options, and best practices when using the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) with Tegile Intelligent Flash Arrays.

6 This document focuses on storage behavior in detail, for both block and file protocols and all the best practices for using these protocols with the combined UCS and Tegile stack . There is not an application or specific use case focus for this paper. There are existing Cisco Validated Designs that you can reference for a deeper understanding of how to configure the UCS and Tegile systems, in detail, for various application-centric use cases. Tegile encourages you to review the joint VDI paper located at: Tegile Overview Tegile is pioneering a new generation of affordable, feature-rich storage arrays, which are dramatically faster and can store more data than standard arrays.

7 Tegile is led by a successful team of industry veterans, and is committed to a philosophy of "Customer First." Tegile Intelligent Flash Arrays are purpose-built to address both performance and capacity needs. High Performance: Tegile arrays are architected from the ground-up to use Flash storage in an Intelligent and optimal manner. The patented IntelliFlash architecture accelerates performance to solid-state speeds without sacrificing the capacity or cost advantage of hard-disk storage. Tegile arrays are significantly faster than legacy arrays and considerably less expensive than all solid-state disk-based arrays.

8 Storage Efficiency: Inline deduplication and compression enhance usable capacity well beyond raw capacity, reducing storage capacity requirements by as much as 90 percent. Availability: Tegile arrays are designed for redundancy, with no single point-of-failure. The rich set of available features includes multiple RAID options, snapshots, cloning, and remote replication, with proactive monitoring and alerts for timely notification when issues arise, and they are included at no extra cost. Single Platform for Multiple Workloads: Tegile arrays support both SAN and NAS protocols for storage access.

9 Desktop images can be deployed using NFS, iscsi or Fibre Channel protocol, while you can provision data folders for the Microsoft Windows virtual desktops using CIFS on the same Array . Page: 6 Scalability: Tegile s product line includes hybrid and all- Flash configurations, which provide progressively increasing performance as they scale. The product line also includes storage expansion shelves to add capacity to the storage arrays. The expansion shelves can include a all solid-state drives, all hard-disk drives, or a mixture of solid-state and hard disk drives (SSDs and HDDs).

10 Tegile arrays balance performance, capacity, features, and price that can satisfy the needs of the most demanding environments. This document covers the setup and Configuration of the Tegile Array with the Cisco UCS blade infrastructure. The sections are divided by protocols -- FC, iscsi , and NFS with a general discussion, and then delving into Configuration of both the UCS and the Tegile Array . Contact Tegile Support for any questions/feedback UCS S torage C onnectivity O verview Cisco UCS was designed as a revolutionary compute blade architecture. F rom a storage perspective, the entire UCS system appears to the outside world as a collection of Network Interface Cards (NICs) and Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters (FC HBAs).