Cisco UCS: Spanning-Tree Need Not Apply! about:reader?url=https://www.globalknowledge.com/us-en/resources/res...

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4-6 minutes

Anyone who’s managed switches

over the years knows that the Spanning-tree protocol (STP) is both
the best and worst thing to ever happen to the data center at layer
2 of the OSI model.

On the plus side, the Spanning-tree protocol is what first allowed us

to create redundant paths within our switching infrastructure,
making our data center much more resilient to outages than ever
before. Anyone who’s experienced a “broadcast storm” knows the
full value of Spanning-tree in the traditional switching environment.
We’ve also seen many improvements in Spanning-tree over the
years to make it work faster and more efficiently (i.e. Rapid
Spanning-tree, Bridge Assurance, and many others).

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On the flip side, this resiliency comes at a steep price. In order to

ensure there are no loops in the switching infrastructure (still
referred to as “bridging loops”… a hold-over from the modern
switch’s predecessor, the bridge), Spanning-tree is forced to shut
down additional interfaces above and beyond the first one between
two switches. While we want additional bandwidth and redundancy,
Spanning-tree simply sees these additional connections as loops
and disables them. In the event of an outage on the first link, it will
kick into action and select a new path, but this process takes an
unreasonable amount of time by today’s data center standards.

With the introduction of the Cisco Unified Computing System

(UCS), we are no longer bound by Spanning-tree’s restrictive
management on our uplink Ethernet connections. By default, the
UCS’s main components, the Fabric Interconnects, operate in End-
Host mode. By doing this, the UCS system literally looks like a big
computer with a bunch of ports to the north-bound LAN switches.
With this, as long as a company has a standards-compliant
network, they are able to simply “drop in” the UCS solution to their
existing infrastructure. Because their existing network sees the
UCS as just a “host”, the switches don’t think they’re connecting to
another switch and therefore, no switching changes are needed.

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While End-Host mode is worthy of its own blog series, it works by

making the Fabric Interconnect logically invisible in the eyes of the
south-bound blades in the Cisco 5108 chassis. Through the
“pinning” of the blade’s network adapter (vNIC) to one of the Fabric
Interconnect’s uplink ports or port-channels, the blade literally sees
the LAN switch as its next hop. Effectively, any traffic that must
leave the blade and enter the LAN cloud must exit and reenter
through this pinned uplink. Because this is the case, it’s like the
blade’s vNIC is directly connected to the LAN. Additionally, as long
as the operating system installed on the UCS blades can
understand and handle multipathing, it not only can achieve a direct
logical connection to the LAN cloud, but it can also achieve an
active/active connection via both Fabric’s A and B.

End Host mode allows us to use the UCS infrastructure

components (the Fabric Interconnects and IOM modules) to

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transparently manipulate the flow of traffic between the networking

adapters on the blades and the LAN switches. Also, because the
logical next hop for the blade is not the Fabric Interconnects but the
north-bound switch, this means that no bridging loops can exist
within the UCS architecture! Because no bridging loops can
physically exist, there’s no need for Spanning-tree.

Again, End-Host mode is the default mode for the UCS architecture
and is the best practice recommendation for operation within your
data center. Reclaiming the simultaneous use of all of our
networking uplinks through the reduction or elimination of
Spanning-tree is just part of Cisco’s larger data center design
philosophy regarding the Nexus Operating System (NX-OS). Other
features, such as the new TRILL-based Fabric Path, are emerging
NX-OS features designed to eliminate the effects of Spanning-tree
within the data center. It’s never been a more exciting time to dive
into Cisco’s data center offerings… stay tuned for many more posts
on these amazing technologies!

Recommended Courses
DCUCD v4.0 - Data Center Unified Computing Design
DCUCI v4.0 - Data Center Unified Computing Implementation

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