[c-nsp] Nexus vpc port channels between 5Ks and 7Ks

[scott owens]

Hello,

We are cabling a mid-sized building to a pair of 7Ks and have a bit of a
redundancy question -
We bought two 7K X2 boards for this building and we plan on cabling our 7K
to 7K vpc links using alternate boards for redundancy ( we have had a 32
port 10Gb module fail in testing and don't plan on doing single anything) .
We have an even number of  6506s that we are going to connect to two Nexus
5Ks,each 6506 will connect to each 5K.
5K_1 will connect to 7K_1 and 7K_2, 5k_2 will connect to 7K_1 and 7K_2 as
well.
our kind of question is should we run parallel paths from each 5K to each 7K
using both X2 modules ? This is the only connectivity to the X2 boards so we
do not have any port or fiber shortage, just need some more gbics.

The reasoning to want to run parallel paths is that with a cable/gbic
failure the traffic will not flow in the VDC/VPC/multichannel etherchannel
fashion but rather will end up traversing links between the 7Ks and 5Ks in
an "odd" fashion.

any thoughts ?

thank you,