Base infrastructure configuration

04/28/2023 Contributors

Network connectivity

The following network connections must be in place before you configure the infrastructure:

Link aggregation that uses port channels and virtual port channels (vPCs) is used throughout, enabling the design for higher bandwidth and high availability:
- vPC is used between the Cisco FI and Cisco Nexus switches.
- Each server has virtual network interface cards (vNICs) with redundant connectivity to the Unified Fabric. NIC failover is used between FIs for redundancy.
- Each server has virtual host bus adapters (vHBAs) with redundant connectivity to the Unified Fabric.
The Cisco UCS FI is configured in end- host mode as recommended, providing dynamic pinning of vNICs to uplink switches.

The following storage connections must be in place before you configure the infrastructure:

Storage port interface groups (ifgroups, vPC)
10Gb link to switch N9K-A
10Gb link to switch N9K-B
In- band management (active-passive bond):
- 1Gb link to management switch N9K-A
- 1Gb link to management switch N9K-B
32Gb FC end-to-end connectivity through Cisco MDS switches; single initiator zoning configured
FC SAN boot to fully achieve stateless computing; servers are booted from LUNs in the boot volume that is hosted on the AFF storage cluster
All MEDITECH workloads are hosted on FC LUNs, which are spread across the storage controller nodes

The following software must be installed:

ESXi installed on the Cisco UCS blades
VMware vCenter installed and configured (with all the hosts registered in vCenter)
VSC installed and registered in VMware vCenter
NetApp cluster configured