Cisco Archives - Lostdomain

CiscoLive EMEA 2018 – Presentation PDFs

February 11, 2018 / Martijn / 0 Comments

After attending CiscoLive EMEA in Barcelona last week, I wanted to get the break-out presentations for reference and to revisit sessions I couldn’t make it to. While the CiscoLive website isn’t bad, it’s not great either and I found myself spending too much time to search and go through the available presentations.

Luckily, the content catalogue seemed to use an open API with a central repository of all session data (including the session id, title and PDF url). I was able to grab it and parse it into a simple list of session id, title, type and category with a … Read more

PowerShell Friday: Using the Cisco ACI API

May 20, 2016 / Martijn / 0 Comments

One of the great things of all network virtualization solutions, is that they can be automated using some form of API that they publish. Cisco ACI is no different and offers a RESTful API which you can consume to do stuff on the network. Well, it’s a ‘sort-of’ RESTful API, as they only seem to use GET and POST functions, no DELETE, PUT, etc. Instead to delete an object, you do a POST with the status ‘deleted’. Anyway, details.

PowerTool

Cisco has a PowerShell implementation for multiple products, for example UCS and ACI. They call their module PowerTool and is … Read more

Updated: Cisco UCS Inventory Script

April 24, 2016 / Martijn / 0 Comments

A few years ago, I created the first version of the Cisco UCS Inventory Script (UIS), a PowerShell script to read all the configuration and environment data from a UCS Manager. It can help you to get an easy overview of UCS installations after completing the initial build, or on an ongoing basis. To answer basic questions like “How many port licenses do we have left?” or “Did we create VLAN X?” – when you have no easy connectivity to the management console.

Next to reporting configuration and environment data, it also provides some basic recommendations about the configuration.

The … Read more

Cisco Enters Hyperconverged Market with HyperFlex

March 1, 2016 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Cisco has just announced a new line of HyperConverged appliances called HyperFlex. With this announcement, Cisco has officially entered the HyperConverged market with an appliance with integrated compute, storage and network.

The HyperFlex line initially consists of three flavours and features the hardware of the existing Unified Computing System (UCS), coupled with a hypervisor (initially VMware vSphere, eventually Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM), a software defined storage solution from SpringPath (licensed for HyperFlex) and the networking solutions of UCS.

The three flavours of HyperFlex consists of a minimum of four nodes of either UCS C220 M4, C240 M4 or B200 M4 … Read more

Leap Second – Cisco Datacenter Effects

May 17, 2015 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Our earth is very slowly slowing down, which means every now and then scientists call to add an extra second to our time to compensate. The last was in 2012, the next one is coming up on June 30, 2015 23:59:60 UTC. For more information about this leap second, check timeanddate.com.

Cisco posted an impact analysis on their website with links to bug reports which determine the impact. While most campus products are unaffected, there are some warnings on datacenter products where the leap second update can lead to a crash or lockup.

My intention is not to scare, … Read more

Cisco UCS Manager Finally gets HTML5 interface

April 4, 2015 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Cisco released version 3.0(2c) (release notes here) of its UCS Infrastructure and UCS Manager software (still UCS Mini only) on the 13th of March, and it has 3 new major features: Fibre channel NPV mode, Ethernet switch mode and a HTML5 web interface for UCS Manager.

While the FC NPV and Ethernet switch modes are pretty exciting as well, they are basically just ports from regular UCS. The HTML5 web interface is an entire new feature, which eliminates the need for java. No more keeping different versions of java, activating an older version when you need to login to … Read more

Cisco UCS Mini – a deep dive

February 7, 2015 / Martijn / 0 Comments

In September 2014, Cisco launched the UCS Mini for what they dubbed “Edge-Scale Computing”. The UCS Mini offering is a stripped down version of the classic UCS system with Fabric Interconnects. To learn about classic UCS, click here.

In this post I will go into some details about the UCS Mini that I’ve learned over the past few months. The information here will assume you have the basic knowledge about what the UCS Mini is and what components are involved. If you need a refresher, I’ve written up a small introduction here.

Let’s dive in.

Fabric Interconnect