Category: Fabrics

When building data center networks using Cisco Nexus switches you can choose to attach the Nexus 2000 Fabric Extender (FEX) to a Nexus 5000 or 7000 depending on your design requirements and budget. In a previous post I briefly described the benefits of Virtual PortChannel (vPC) and discussed design options for the Nexus 2000/5500/5000. In this post I will go over the vPC design options for the Nexus 2000/7000 and important things to consider while creating the design.

Without vPC

The picture above shows how you can connect a Nexus 2000 to its parent switch Nexus 7000 without using vPC. Topology A on the left shows a  single attached Nexus 2000 to a  7000 and a server connected to a server port on the Nexus 2000. There is no redundancy in this topology and failure of the Nexus 7000 or 2000 would cause the server to lose connectivity to the fabric. In this design you can have up to 32 FEX’s per Nexus 7000 with Sup1/2 or 48 FEX’s with Sup2E.

Topology B on the right has also no vPC and NIC teaming in this case is used for failover. The solid blue link is the primary connection and the dotted link is the backup. It’s up to the OS on the server to detect any failure upstream and fail over to the backup link. Similar to A in this design you can have up to 32 FEX’s per Nexus 7000 with Sup1/2 or 48 FEX’s with Sup2E.

With vPC

The picture above hows the supported vPC topology for the Nexus 7000. Topology C is called straight-through vPC in which each Nexus 2000 (FEX) is connected to one parent Nexus 7000 while the server is dual attached to a pair of Nexus 2000. In this case NIC on server must support LACP so that the two FEX’s appear as a single switch. Most modern Intel and HP NIC’s support LACP today. This topology supports up to 64 FEX’s (32 per Nexus 7000) with Sup1/2 or 96 FEX’s (48 per Nexus 7000) with Sup 2E.

Maximum Supported Nexus FEX As of Today:

Notes:

• The  Nexus 7000 modules that support FEX are: N7K-M132XP-12L (32 x 10GbE SFP+), N7K-F248XP-25 (48 x 10GbE SFP/SPF+), and all M2 modules. The F1, F2 copper, and 1GbE M1 modules don’t support FEX
• All FEX uplinks must be placed in the same VDC on the Nexus 7000
• Dual attaching the FEX to pair of Nexus 7000 is not supported as of today on the Nexus 7000 which means in the event of I/O module failure all FEX’s hanging off of that module will be knocked out. For this reason it’s recommended to have at least two IO modules in the chassis that support FEX and distribute the uplinks across those two modules for redundancy
• If the FEX is going to be within 100 meters from the Nexus 7000, you can use Cisco Fabric Extended Transceiver (FET) on the uplinks which offers cost-effective way to connect the FEX to its parent switch. The FET is much cheaper than the 10G SFP+ optic

Virtual PortChannel (vPC) allows two links that are connected to two different physical Cisco Nexus 5000 or 7000 switches to appear to the downstream device as a single PortChannel link.  That downstream device could be a server, Nexus 2000, or any Classical Ethernet switch.

vPC is useful to prevent spanning tree from blocking redundant links in the topology. After all you  have spent fortune and bought those expensive 10G ports and the last thing you want is for spanning tree to block them.

Having said that they are several ways to connect the Cisco Nexus Fabric Extender (FEX) to its parent the Nexus 5000 or 7000 switch. In this post I’m going to discuss supported vPC topologies for the Nexus series. I’m going to start with the Nexus 2000/5000 now and will add a separate post for the Nexus 2000/7000 options later.

Without vPC

The picture above shows the supported non-vPC topologies. Topology A on the left shows a straight forward connectivity between Nexus 2000 and 5000 with a server connected to a server port on the Nexus 2000. There is no redundancy in this topology and failure of the Nexus 5000 or 2000 would cause the server to lose connectivity to the fabric. In this design you can have up to 24 FEX’s per Nexus 5500 in L2 mode and 16 FEX’s in L3.

Topology B on the right has also no vPC and NIC teaming in this case is used for failover. The solid blue link is the primary connection and the dotted link is the backup. It’s up to the OS on the server to detect any failure upstream and fail over to the backup link. Similar to A in this design you can have up to 24 FEX’s per Nexus 5500 in L2 mode and 16 FEX’s in L3.

With vPC

The picture above hows the supported vPC topologies for the Nexus 5000. Topology C is called straight-through vPC in which each Nexus 2000 (FEX) is connected to one parent Nexus 5000 while server is dual-homed. In this case NIC on server must support LACP so that the two FEX’s appear as a single switch. Most modern Intel and HP NIC’s support LACP today. This topology supports up to 48 FEX’s (24 per Nexus 5500) in L2 mode and 32 FEX’s (16 per Nexus 5500) in L3 mode.

In topology D on the other hand each FEX is dual-homed and so is the server. So the NIC on the server must support LACP as in C. In this topology you can have up to 24 FEX’s in L2 mode and 16 FEX’s in L3.

Topology E is similar to D where each FEX is dual-homed but the server is single-homed. In this topology you can have up to 24 FEX’s in L2 mode and 16 FEX’s in L3.

Maximum Supported Cisco FEX As of Today: