Deploying Storage Spaces Direct – Part 18 #StorageSpacesDirect #MVPHour

In Part # 17 of this series we were working with some Cisco Meraki Infrastructure. I wrote that I didn’t feel that the Meraki Infrastructure Supported Priority Flow Control 802.1Qbb. I just heard back from Cisco Technical Support and they have confirmed the following:

***********I redacted the support engineer’s email and such for privacy reasons

Sam forwarded me your note. I can confirm that flow control (802.1Qbb) is supported, but is not enabled on Meraki switches by default. That feature requires a call to support (415-432-1203), so they can apply an override to turn it on.

So, from what I can tell there are many advanced features that the Meraki infrastructure will support. You just need to call support to get them turned on. So, there is hope for us with our Storage Spaces Direct Configurations after all.

Now I am just waiting for final confirmation that they do indeed support Data Center Bridging and then we should be good to go.

And then as I writing this an email comes back from Cisco Support. Looks like we have some bad news about Data Center Bridging (DCB).

***********I redacted the support engineer’s email and such for privacy reasons

I don’t believe we do, but have reached out to our product team for confirmation, in case there is something I’m not aware of. Will let you know what I find out.

So for complete support with Meraki and RoCE we are still in a TBD state. I will update as I learn more from them.

On a side note while researching this I came across this amazing write-up on DataCenter Bridging from Cisco.

http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/collateral/data-center-virtualization/ieee-802-1-data-center-bridging/at_a_glance_c45-460907.pdf