Resolving ENM Source Pinning Failed Errors with Appliance Ports

One method that folks use to present storage within a Cisco UCS environment is by creating an Appliance Port on the Fabric Interconnects. I wrote about this a long time ago for those looking to consume NFS storage with a directly attached NAS box, and I would imagine that with the release of UCS Mini, more folks are going to want to dip a toe into the world of Appliance Ports. After all, it’s a very easy way to consume storage for the UCS domain at 10 GbE speeds without having to worry about 10 GbE upstream.

I was recently working with a client that wanted to attach a Tintri VMstore to a pair of 6248 Fabric Interconnects. Tintri is an NFS-only array that offers some snazzy VM-centric storage and is one heck of a great way to provide a home for virtual machines. Upon cabling the Tintri and setting up an Appliance Port for each interface, an error popped up stating that “ENM source pinning failed” as a Major Fault (the orange bang triangle). I can’t show their environment, so I’ve re-created the error in my work lab as shown below:

enm-failure

Jeff Allen over at Jeff Said So has a post entitled ENM Source Pinning Failed – A Lesson in Disjoint Layer 2 that does a great job talking about this error in the context of disjointed layer 2 uplinks, but it’s a slightly different scenario with Appliance Ports. Here’s that same error with some more details:

enm-error-details

In my case, the issue has to do with discrepancies around the VLANs created in the LAN Cloud versus the Appliances area. Take a look at the following VLAN configuration and see if you can spot the issue:

vlans-not-matching

Take a look at the VLAN called Example_IP_Storage (1234). Notice how it does not exist in the upper list of VLANs for the LAN Cloud? This is a problem. You must make sure that the VLAN being used by the Appliance Port exists in both areas: the LAN Cloud and the Appliances.

First, I’ll fix the VLANs in the LAN Cloud so that VLAN 1234, which is the Example_IP_Storage VLAN, exists in both locations. I like to use the same name for both sections to create consistency.

matching-vlans

Next, I’ll check on the port to see if it is now operational.

port-fixed

It’s that easy! Too bad the error message is a bit cryptic. It would be nice if UCS Manager would prompt you to create the VLAN in both areas, or just do it for you.