Nexus

Whether it is a fresh new install or a software upgrade, these would be the time for you to also consider an EPLD upgrade. Unlike software upgrade where you can potentially avoid an extended downtime using In-Service Software Upgrade (ISSU), EPLD upgrade requires the hardware to be taken offline and, in some cases, even chassis reload. Since the EPLD version has to stay in sync with the NXOS version, depending on what version you are upgrading to, you might need to upgrade all the pieces of hardware, and these include all supervisors, linecards, fans, and fabrics, which can result in a significant downtime.

In this article, we will provide timing results from running tests between sequential and parallel EPLD upgrade. This is to give you some guideline and help you determine appropriate actions for your environment.

Cisco has recently released a new datacenter switch product family: Nexus 7700. For those of you who are already familiar with Nexus 7000 and wondering about their similarities and differences, here are the quick rundowns on Nexus 7700.

If you are familiar with Nexus vPC configuration, you might have been setting different STP priority on the primary and secondary switches so the primary is always a STP root, and have that lined up with, for example, HSRP active node. With vPC+ (ie. running vPC on a pair of switches that participate in fabricpath), the two Nexus switches appear as a single logical switch to both fabricpath cloud and upstream/downstream vPC switches, so it is actually crucial to make sure the upstream/downstream vPC switches receive consistent STP root priority regardless of which path is active. In this article, we demonstrate the importance of setting identical STP priority on the vPC+ peer switches, how the switches react when a superior BPDU is received, and other implications using Cisco Nexus 5000.

When you configure vPC on Cisco Nexus switches, vPC keepalive link is used by the two vPC peers to detect the liveliness of each other. The vPC keepalive plays a critical role of resolving a dual-active (aka split brain) scenario when the vPC peer link is down. This article presents different interface options of configuring vPC keepalive link on Nexus 5000 and discusses their pros and cons.