Cisco vPC between VDCs in single Nexus 7k (Lab)

November 1, 2014 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Cisco virtual Port-channels technology is a pretty straight-forward technique: make two switches seem like one switch to a downstream switch, connected with a port-channel. The downstream switch has a single port-channel going upward, which makes the switch high available and eliminating the use of spanning-tree. It looks like this:

Read more about vPC here. For the rest of this post, I’ll assume you know how to configure and use vPC.

In a lab where you have a single Nexus 7000 switch for testing and studying, you would divide it up into VDCs for ultimate usage. OTV, Fabricpath and the … Read more

Cisco OTV Lab with Multicast example

October 22, 2014 / Martijn / 2 Comments

Cisco OTV (or Overlay Transport Virtualisation) is a technology inside Cisco Nexus switches (7K) for extending VLANs across a routed network. You can read all about OTV here and here. This post consists of an example configuration for a lab where you have a single Nexus 7K and you want to get OTV over multicast running between VDCs and comes from my CCIE study notes for when I was practicing with OTV. I’ve heard some people have issues with getting the multicast configuration working, so I figured I would share mine here.

First off, to create the illusion of … Read more

Cisco UCS B-Series CPU Upgrades – WILL_BOOT_FAULT

September 21, 2014 / Martijn / 3 Comments

UCS is different then other server platforms, which sometimes makes simple maintenance tasks not as straightforward as you’d think. We had an truckload of CPU upgrades last week. A regular server admin would think; “Hey, I just take this old CPU out and put this new CPU in and bob’s my uncle!” – well, UCS might have a surprise for you.

One of my colleagues (a ‘traditional’ server guy) handled this replacement and was confronted with an error message when reinserting the blades: WILL_BOOT_FAULT (awesome description once again, Cisco). Considering the error message itself, they went looking for boot issues. … Read more

Cisco UCS Grand Slam Announcements

September 4, 2014 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Cisco held a “UCS Grandslam” today, where they announced some amazing new UCS products and announced a few refreshers of the UCS family. I think “Grand Slam” is a baseball term (not american 😉 ), because there was a pretty cool presentation from the major league baseball on how they are using the Internet of Things (IoT) to further the multimedia experience of baseball.

On to the important stuff! Cisco is refreshing and expanding the UCS family with a few new awesome things:

UCS Mini. Smaller UCS Pod, with built-in Fabric Interconnects (check my review a while

Cisco releases Nexus 1000v 3.1 with an Update Manager!

August 28, 2014 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Cisco has released version 3.1 of its virtualised switch (available for download here). It comes with increased scalability and resiliency, but one very cool thing stood out for me: the Virtual Switch Update Manager or VSUM.

The VSUM is not the only cool improvement on the virtual switch, here’s an overview of changes:

Scale
- Increased Scalability (Advanced Edition) – More than doubles the scale from the previous release. The virtual switch now supports 250 hosts/servers per switch with 10,000 ports per switch. In addition it supports 4094 active VLANs and 16 million VXLAN (6144 active VXLANs) per switch across

Taking the CCIE Datacenter Lab Exam

August 18, 2014 / Martijn / 5 Comments

As I’m writing this post, I am still high on the drug that is called a passing grade. After 10 months of studying the blueprint and putting in hundreds of hours reading through the configuration guides, building topologies (just to tear them down and start over when you’re done), one failed attempt in May, dreaming about all things Cisco UCS, Nexus (physical and virtual) and MDS..I can finally say that I got my CCIE on Datacenter: number 44460 (an easy one to remember too!).

Stating the obvious is usually not my thing, but this time I’ll make an exception: Preparation … Read more

Ultimate Cisco Nexus FCoE Configuration Guide

June 9, 2014 / Martijn / 8 Comments

This post is part of my CCIE Datacenter reference series and will cover all there is to get FCoE up and running on the Cisco Nexus 7k, 5k and 2k switches.

The text assumes you have a understanding knowledge of fundamentals (storage paths, flogis, vPC, etc) and can be used as a configuration reference (I basically wrote this for myself).

Installing & Enabling FCoE

Nexus 7K

Installing and enabling FCoE on the Nexus 7k involves getting the storage VDC up and running. This section will cover just that.

QoS

The Nexus 7k comes with a default QoS policy of default-nq-8e-policy, … Read more

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