Back story:
I am upgrading/replacing our existing UCS environment which us UCSM Managed, Cisco b200m5s and some older m4s. Cisco 6248 FIs. FC storage connected to 9108 MDS switches.
The new environment will be greenfield and be IIM with 6536 FIs and a 9108 chassis with newer M7s. These will be connected to the very same 9108 MDS switches using the same VSAN IDs as the existing.
Our current environment appears to be setup so that 2 FC ports from each FI are setup in a port channel to the MDS switches. I do show the port channel setup on the mds switches but i also notice that trunk mode is set to off on the ports in the port channel.
This has never caused a problem for us but im wondering if that should have been set on?
Either way......i found this generic document about setting up a port channel between UCS IMM and MDS which suggests when using a port channel for FC you should also set it up for trunking both in the VSAN policy and have trunking turned in in the MDS switches on the interfaces that are in the port channel.
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/cloud-systems-management/intersight/221059-configure-san-port-channel-between-ucs-i.html
1. Should we have setup a trunk in our current environment along with our port channel?
2. If I setup our new environment with IMM and MDS not to have trunking enabled will it cause us issues?
Right now in IMM i do not have it setup to be a port channel at all. Just 2 links from each FI to each MDS. Do i need a port channel or can i leave it like this and still have redundancy? Will i need to setup any kind of pin groups if i dont have a port channel? Seems like it might be easier to setup a port channel to avoid that and make things a bit easier for us in the future but i dont want to complicate things either if we dont have to.
IF i do setup a port channel and my switch and storage can handle 32gb per port, do i set it up each FI port as 16gbps so that the port channel is equal to 32gbps aggregate per FI or do i just set everything to 32gb per second? Perhaps set to to auto and let the switch sort it out? I will say that our existing 6248 FIs are set at 8gbps and our many storage arrays are setup for 16gbps. I guess im not sure if i should be setting things to 32gbps if the array ports are only showing they are connected at 16 in the mds
