Earlier this year Cisco announced and has begun shipping the Cisco UCS 6454 Fabric Interconnect (FI). The Cisco UCS 6454 offers line-rate, low-latency, lossless 10/25/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and Fibre Channel functions. In this blog post I provide an overview of what you can expect in this fourth generation FI and provide some things you need to be aware of before migrating.
Overview
The Cisco UCS 6454 Fabric Interconnect (FI) is a 4th generation, 54 port device is a very robust offering that supports Ethernet, Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). At first glance it may appear there are only 6 uplinks on the right side of the FI but as you can see in the image below, every port has an option of being an uplink. Ports 1 – 8 are considered “universal ports” because they support FC as well as Ethernet and FCoE. Ports 45-48 support 1GbE as well as 10/25GbE.
Upgrade Considerations
There are some things you need to consider before moving to the 6454 FI. First, you need to make sure your existing migration path is supported. Based upon a Cisco White Paper titled “Migrate to Cisco UCS 6454 Fabric Interconnect with 10- to 25-Gbps Ports“, only the Cisco UCS 6200 Series Fabric Interconnect and the 2200XP Fabric Extender are supported. No other fabric interconnect series is supported.
Additionally, you need to remove any unsupported servers prior to migrating. Here’s a list of blade servers that are supported for Cisco UCS Release 4.0(1):
- Cisco UCS B22 M3
- Cisco UCS B200 M3 and M4
- Cisco UCS B260 M4
- Cisco UCS B420 M3 and M4
- Cisco UCS B460 M4
Here’s the list of UCS B-Series adapters supported for migration:
- Cisco UCS VIC 1240
- Cisco UCS VIC 1280
- Cisco UCS VIC 1340
- Cisco UCS VIC 1380
Lastly, here’s the list of supported B-Series Fabric extenders:
- Cisco UCS 2204
- Cisco UCS 2208
There are a couple of other things you need to know, which aren’t spelled out in the Cisco Migration white paper referenced above but can be found on a Cisco website titled “Migration Guide: Cisco UCS 6200 Series Fabric Interconnects to Cisco UCS 6454 Fabric Interconnects“.
- Migration components must be on Cisco UCS Manager Release 4.0(1) or a later release
- Licenses owned for the Cisco UCS 6200 Fabric Interconnect are not transferable to the Cisco UCS 6454 Fabric Interconnect
- Traffic has to be evacuated during the migration which means the upgrade should be performed during a maintenance window
EOL Dates To Know
Cisco published End of Life (EOL) and End of Sales (EOS) dates for the Cisco UCS 6200 so here’s the list to help you plan your migration timeline:
- End-of-Life Announcement: March 1, 2019
- End-of-Sale Date: May 31, 2019
- Last Ship Date: August 29, 2019
For the full list, visit https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-b-series-blade-servers/eos-eol-notice-c51-742066.html?emailclick=CNSemail
If there is anything I overlooked or incorrectly stated, please let me know in the comments below or email me at KEVIN AT BLADESMADESIMPLE.COM. Thanks for reading.
Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com. He has over 20 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace. Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization. Kevin has worked at Dell EMC since August 2011 as a Server Sales Engineer covering the Global Enterprise market from 2011 to 2017 and now works as a Chief Technical Server Architect supporting the Central Enterprise Region at Dell EMC.
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