I have been replacing a lot of older Cisco ISR routers with 4000 series ISR’s lately. One of the more common things I have seen companies order with the new 4000 series routers are UCS-E blades; especially for smaller sites that don’t any servers. Unfortunately IOS-XE is still relatively new and it can be difficult to find proper configuration guides or working configs. As a result I have seen a lot of bad setups where engineers do not use the internal EVC link for UCS-E connectivity. Instead they cable the UCS-E external ports directly back into the router or cable it directly to the LAN switch. While this works, they are essentially running it as it was a separate device on the network and not part of the router. In this post I will provide a base UCS-E configuration to get people quickly up and running.
Example IP allocation:
- /29 for CIMC & ESXi Management.
(Example: 10.0.0.240/29) - /27 for UCS-E Server Vlan.
(Example: 10.0.0.128/27)
When push comes to shove its best to view/treat the BDI interface, that’s tied to the ucse1/0/1 service instance, no different than a SVI on a L3 switch.
ucse subslot 1/0 imc access-port shared-lom console imc ip address 10.0.0.242 255.255.255.248 default-gateway 10.0.0.241 ! interface ucse1/0/0 description *** UCS - Internal L3 Management (10.0.0.240/29) *** ip address 10.0.0.241 255.255.255.248 negotiation auto switchport mode trunk ! interface ucse1/0/1 description *** UCS - Internal L2 Interface *** no ip address negotiation auto switchport mode trunk ! service instance 1 ethernet description *** Server Vlan EVC *** encapsulation dot1q 1 bridge-domain 1 ! ! interface BDI1 description Server Vlan (10.0.0.128/27) ip address 10.0.0.129 255.255.255.224 no ip redirects no ip unreachables no ip proxy-arp encapsulation dot1Q 1 |
For further reading on EVC’s the following blog post is really good: http://ccie-in-3-months.blogspot.com/2009/09/evc-flexible-service-mapping.html