Monday, March 19, 2018

Cisco UCS rack extension

So I have a cage full of racks but I did a poor job of future proofing my infrastructure rack. I have 4 UCS chassis and the Fabric interconnects in the first rack. It is filled up with storage devices as well. I need to expand to another rack but the next available one is about 20 ft away. The core switch (nexus 9k) is in the rack right next to it and I just have my uplinks from the FIC plugged into it. I believe I made a mistake by plugging storage devices into the FIC instead of the Nexus (will have to fix this later).

How do I extend my new rack that I plan on putting more storage and UCS chassis into back to the first rack? Do I just run my IO modules on the chassis back to the original FIC (thats a lot of cables)? Or do I need to buy another set of FICs? I am probably planning on buying like a nexus 2k to extend back to the core for the storage expansion devices in this new rack instead of plugging them into the FIC.

What is best practice to expand a UCS rack?

Edit 1 - I am using twinax cables for all data traffic and cat5 for mgmt ports. New rack would be too far away to keep using twinax.



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