[c-nsp] Nexus 2232 FEX into UCS 6120/6140?

[Tom Lanyon]

Hi list,

Slightly off-topic for NSP, but was just wondering if anyone's tried plugging a 2232PP Nexus FEX into a UCS 6100 series fabric interconnect?

This doesn't appear to be supported (although it's apparently possible to plug one of the 48x GigE FEXs in), but I'm curious whether it currently works unsupported or is planned to be supported in a future software release.

The goal here is to be able to plug a bunch of C-series UCS servers in via 10 Gig + FCoE so that they can be managed by the same UCS Manager instance as all the B-series UCS blade servers connected to a (pair of) 6100.

Obviously we can consolidate all of this at a higher level into a N5K or N7K, but then we're not able to manage the C-series servers via the UCS Manager. The only supported option seems to be plugging the C-series servers directly into the 6100 devices, but then we're limited to a maximum of ~40 servers (dual-homed to a pair of 40-port 6140s, minus whatever ports are occupied by uplinks or B-series chassis downlinks) and also need to pay the per-port licenses and have a nightmare cabling all the servers back to the 6100s.

My understanding is that the 6100 and N5k share common HW, so I'd imagine that this is theoretically possible...

Thanks,
Tom