Cisco MDS Smart Zoning

I was doing some reading this morning on the new MDS 9710 Director Class switch and came across a feature I hadn’t heard of before. The feature is called “Smart Zoning” and is a real godsend for SAN and data center administrators.

Nexus 5500 FCoE and Jumbo MTU

I happened across an interesting scenario this morning while I was doing configuring jumbo MTU of 9216 on the Nexus 5500 switches in our lab.

I wanted to enable jumbo frames and with Nexus 5500s you have to do this with a QoS policy map. Here are the steps:

1. Create a new policy map of type network-qos
2. Add the default network-qos class type of class-default
3. Configure the MTU to 9216
4. Add the new policy map to system qos

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Cisco UCS Multihop FCoE QoS Gotcha

See my post on configuration and migration to multihop FCoE for details on my lab setup – https://jeremywaldrop.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/cisco-ucs-fcoe-multihop-configuration-and-migration/

When I first configured UCS multihop FCoE I experienced terrible SAN performance. It was so bad that it took 20 minutes to boot a single virtual machine.

Cisco UCS FCoE Multihop Configuration and Migration

This post will walk through the configuration of FCoE multihop in UCS and cover how to migrate from traditional FC to FCoE.