Datasheet

Data Sheet
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 3 of 12
VSANs for Virtualization, Segmentation, and Isolation
VSAN, an industry standard for fabric virtualization capabilities, enables more efficient storage network use by
creating hardware-based isolated environments within a single physical SAN fabric or switch. Up to 32 VSANs are
supported per switch. Each VSAN can be zoned as a typical SAN and maintains its own fabric services and
management domains for added scalability and resilience. VSANs allow the cost of SAN infrastructure to be shared
among more users while helping ensure segregation of traffic and retaining independent control of configuration on a
VSAN-by-VSAN basis. The switch-on-a-chip application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are ready to support
Inter-VSAN Routing (IVR), with IVR being considered for a future Cisco MDS 9000 NX-OS Software release.
Advanced Traffic Management for Resilient SANs
Advanced traffic management capabilities integrated into the Cisco MDS 9148 simplify deployment and optimization
of core-edge fabrics.
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Virtual output queuing helps ensure line-rate performance on each port, independent of traffic pattern, by
eliminating head-of-line blocking.
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Each port group consisting of 4 ports has a pool of 128 buffer credits, with a default of 32 buffer credits per
port. When extended distances are required, up to 125 buffer credits can be allocated to a single port within
the port group. This extensibility is available without additional licensing.
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PortChannels allow users to aggregate up to 16 physical Inter-Switch Links (ISLs) into a single logical bundle,
providing load-balancing bandwidth use across all links. The bundle can consist of any port from the switch,
helping ensure that the bundle remains active even in the event of a port group failure.
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Fabric Shortest Path First (FSPF)-based multipathing provides the intelligence to load balance across up to
16 equal-cost paths and, in the event of a switch failure, dynamically reroute traffic.
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QoS can be used to manage bandwidth and control latency, to prioritize critical traffic.
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Comprehensive port and flow statistics facilitate sophisticated performance analysis and service-level
agreement (SLA) accounting.
Simplified Scalable Deployment of Virtual Machine-Aware SANs
Cisco MDS 9148 provides the same consistent, policy-based SAN capabilities to individual virtual machines as those
available to physical servers. With NPIV, a standard Fibre Channel protocol feature, individual virtual machines
assume a full identity on the SAN so that Fibre Channel services such as zoning, QoS, performance monitoring, and
security can be provided to each virtual machine.
Given that the number of Fibre Channel domain IDs in a Fibre Channel SAN environment is limited, larger core-edge
enterprise SAN environments using the Cisco MDS 9148 as a top-of-the-rack switch or as an edge switch can be
deployed by enabling the Cisco NPV feature on the edge Cisco MDS 9148 so that no Fibre Channel domain IDs are
used by that switch. NPV aggregates locally connected hosts into one or more uplinks to core switches in a pass-
through manner without using a Fibre Channel domain ID. The F-port trunking feature enables multiple VSANs to be
transported on the uplink from a Cisco MDS 9148 operating in NPV mode to the core switch.
The Cisco FlexAttach feature gives Cisco MDS 9148 customers the flexibility to add, move, or replace servers easily
without the need to reconfigure SAN switches or storage arrays. It provides this flexibility by virtualizing the SAN
identity of a server, which enables a server to retain its SAN identity even if the server is moved or replaced.
The Cisco MDS 9148 is supported as an option by the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition, a
collaboration by Cisco, EMC, and VMware, which provides the Vblock
™
Infrastructure Packages framework for
integrated virtualization solutions.