Heartbeat between Cisco C220m4s and B200m4

[martsa123]

Hello!

We are currently moving our vSphere Infrastructure from two IBM servers to one B200m4 blade and one C220m4s server.

On our old servers we have one direct uplink between the servers, which is used as heartbeat for 2 virtualized Windows Clusters.

Now that one of our servers is within the UCS chassis, we cannot directly attach any cable to the server.

I've read about LAN pin groups and the fact that you can point vNICs to only use that specified uplink.

So we had the idea to create 2 additional VNICs, point them to uplink Port x on FI A and FI B, directly connect these ports with C220m4s server, and add both NICs to a vSwitch on both servers. Is that even possible, will it even work?

Plan B was to seperate regular traffic from heartbeat traffic by using VLANs. Would be much easier to implement, but in case of failure, less effective. 

I'm relatively new to UCS infrastructure, so my idea might sound weird. 

Thanks in advance, best regards

Martin

[Yasser Al-Alem · Accepted solution]

Hi Martin,

the UCS uplink ports should be connected to ext switch only,

you can connect the C220M4 server to UCSM and then create two vnics {vnic0- F.I-A , vnic1-F.I-B} with "heartbeat Vlan" and do the same config for B200 M4.

or you can crate one VNIC nad enable Failover in service profile of blade/rack server

this way two servers will communicate {heartbeat} on the same Fabric on Heartbeat Valn

C220M4 integration Guide:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/servers-unified-computing/ucs-c-series-rack-mount-ucs-managed-server-software/products-installation-and-configuration-guides-list.html

[martsa123]

Hi Yasser,

thanks for your reply. We are now going to realise the heartbeat by adding VLANs to new VNICs, like you mentioned.

Best regards, Martin