Datacenter

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.

As part of Cisco ASA 1000V installation, you need to decide if you want to run the ASA 1000V in VNMC or ASDM mode. Since the mode cannot be changed after the installation, you will need to pick this wisely. Here are quick comparisons that might help you decide which mode is appropriate to your deployment.

When it comes time to remove your Cisco Nexus 1000V, whether in production or lab environment, one of the most common mistakes is to delete VSM without disconnecting the VSM from the vCenter. If that is what you did, you will soon discover that your N1KV still sticks around under the Networking and vCenter does not allow you to remove it. Although, there is a way to fix this but it is rather a painful process involving re-creating a VSM and force it to use the old extension key so you can register and unregister properly. Needless to say, you would be better off doing it right the first time. In this article, we walk you through step-by-step to completely remove both VSM and/or VEM in VMware. You will see that the process is, somewhat, a reverse of the installation.

When it comes to planning your Cisco Nexus 1000V install, you will find that there are a lot of decisions you need to make from both design perspective and installation procedure.  Cisco provides multiple implementation options that you can choose from to get your Nexus 1000V up and running.  Having these different options gives you flexibility but, at the same time, requires you to be aware of the specifics as you will see in this article that some options may not always be suitable in all situations. This can be overwhelming especially to newcomers who are still trying to grasp on the concept and components of Nexus 1000V. In this article, we discuss some of the common deployment options of Nexus 1000V that you can use to build your design upon. We will look at pros and cons for each option. Although we will not be covering installation and configuration processes in detail, we have videos that provide step-by-step guides on our website so feel free to check them out. Here, we assume that you have basic knowledge of Cisco Nexus 1000V and VMware vSphere server.

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.