ISL beteen Cisco Nexus 5000 and Cisco MDS 9020

the code on 9020 is not supported to be attached to a Nexus. It might still work but you will be on your own as far as support is concerned. Does your storage have available ports that could be connected to the new switch ?

We did discuss using ports in the storage, but we would have to disconnect current connections e.g loose redundancy... So we discarded this option.

Since this is something I need for a short period, 20-30 days to complete the data migration, I am not too conserned about support.

brave soul

i am myself curious if this is going to work , i would not try it with production VSAN though. Create a new VSAN on 9020, let's say vsan 9.  Document its current domain id  (sh fcdomain vsan 9).  Now create vsan 9 on the nexus switch. Make sure its domain id is not the same as the one on 9020. I assume these switches are close that you will be using short -wave SFPs and multi-mode fibre cables. The ports that will be used to connect 9020 to the Nexus need to be configured to trunk allow vsan 9.  So since these are test VSANs ..on 9020 ..drop a test host into this VSAN and on the nexus add your new storage ports to vsan 9. Do some zoning, make sure storage visibility is ok.

This worked out great.

I was unable to create VSAN's on the MDS 9020.

What I did was:

- Create a new VSAN (1000) on the Nexus

- Add a port to the new VSAN (1000)

- Verified Domain ID of new VSAN and compared to Domain ID on MDS 9020 to make sure there would be no "two switches with same Domain ID)

- Connected that port to the MDS 9020

- Ran "show fcdomain domain-list" on both Nexus and MDS 9020 to verify.

- Copyed/Activated the zoneset from 9020 to the new VSAN (1000).

--> Tried to see if I could use inter-VSAN-routing, but this was not supported on any switch according to DCNM.

- Manually replicated all zones from the production VSAN (2000) on the Nexus to the zoneset on VSAN (1000)

- Copyed and Activated the zoneset on VSAN (1000) to VSAN (2000).

- Reconfigured the port connecting the Nexus to the MDS 9020 to be member of VSAN (2000).

--> At this point I verified all Server-to-Storage connections was still working.

- Added zones to VSAN (2000) zoneset so that servers connected to Nexus switch could see storage connected to MDS 9020.

--> New hosts loged into storage connected to MDS 9020 fine and masking LUNs to the new servers worked fine.

this is confusing. So you are saying that you did not create VSAN 2000 on the Nexus ?

Oh, sorry. I did not configure the Nexus from scratch, someone else created VSAN 2000 and its zoneset etc. before me.

so if VSAN 2000 already existed on the Nexus and you connected MDS 9020 that already had VSAN 2000, then you simply merged the two VSANs? I don't understand why you needed VSAN 1000.

MDS 9020 has no VSAN functionality. (configure - vsan database does not exist) Not sure if this is a feature that can be turned on or if the MDS 9020 simply does not support VSANs.

There was not TE ports, only E ports since the MDS 9020 did not have VSAN support.

I used VSAN 1000 as an intermediate VSAN simply to test if the switches where compatible. Since VSAN 1000 on the Nexus did not have an active zoneset I did not have to bother to "merge" the zoneset from VSAN 2000 and the MDS to see if the two switches where compatible.

Once I had verified it worked with VSAN 1000 it was a simple matter of making the zoneset in the MDS and VSAN 2000 on the Nexus identical and merge the MDS with VSAN 2000.

i think MDS supported VSANs back in SAN-OS 1.x . I am just curious how this works, can you post output from "sh fcdomain domain-list" from Nexus and MDS

Thanks

Sorry, this is a secure site so I am not allowed to share any specific command/configuration output like that.

can you scramble the WWN and VSAN IDs ..i am just curious how it's working without identical VSANs on both MDS and Nexus.