Junos Stretch VLAN Using SRX Branch – who needs Cisco’s OTV?

Posted on by Admin

Traditional and modern Enterprises often suffer from inflexible service providers either charging over the odds, taking forever to make changes, or providing overly complex and unreliable services. SDN is beginning to threaten the way things are done in the data centre and enterprise, moving all the complexity up to a different level. The dawn of the Overlay and Underlay networks is here. Simple flat L2 and hardware switched L3 networks are pretty much the only…

Read More

Cisco UCS Boot From SAN Video Walktrough

Posted on by Admin

Cisco UCS Boot From SAN Video Walktrough I’ve been meaning to do this video for ages and finally had some time to do it. The most common questions I tend to get are generally around booting a Cisco UCS Server from the SAN. Now in order to take full advantage of the statelessness of Cisco UCS servers we certainly want to avoid any dependency on a blade and SAN Boot is a great way to do…

Read More

Disable vMotion for a single VM

Posted on by Admin

Disable vMotion for a single VM This question pops up regularly on the VMTN forums and reddit. It’s a viable question but the admins who request this feature usually don’t want Maintenance mode to break or any other feature that helps them to manage large scale environments. When you drill down, you discover that they only want to limit the option of a manual vMotion triggered by an administrator. Instead of configuring complex DRS rules,…

Read More

vCenter 5.5 Upgrade with Windows Server 2012 R2

Posted on by Admin

vCenter 5.5 Upgrade with Windows Server 2012 R2 This Upgrade Guide details the step-by-step process for upgrading your vCenter Server from 5.1 to 5.5 Update 1c.  Also included is the build of a new Windows Server 2012 R2 OS for the vCenter 5.5 services whilst maintaining a separate SQL Server 2008 R2 Database. I was unfortunate enough to make the decision to deploy the distributed vCenter model in vSphere 5.0, which I maintained through to…

Read More

FCoE – Waiting for flogi…

Posted on by Admin

FCoE – Waiting for flogi… Last week I was working on a pair of Nexus 5596s and for the life of me could not get a CNA to login to the fabric.  I kept getting the following error: 2012 Jul  6 11:36:33 ANR-N5K-A %PORT-5-IF_TRUNK_DOWN: %$VSAN 664%$ Interface vfc1, vsan 664 is down (waiting for flogi) After reconfiguring the vfc and pulling my hair out, I contacted Cisco TAC and learned the error of my ways.  The…

Read More

Booting UCS C from FlexFlash

Posted on by Admin

Booting UCS C from FlexFlash We installed a few UCS C220M3s the other day and opted to boot from the 16GB FlexFlash SD card.  The confusing part of the FlexFlash is that it’s broken down into four partitions: SCU — The server can access the Cisco UCS Server Configuration Utility. Drivers — The server can access the Cisco drivers. HV — The server can access a user-installed hypervisor. HUU — The server can access the Cisco…

Read More

DMVPN as a Redundant Network Solution

Posted on by Admin

DMVPN as a Redundant Network Solution Recently I redesigned a network to take advantage of DMVPN.  This customer had the need for high availability between their main office and branches with the advent of cloud-based applications that their organization used.  For instance, they needed the branch to be able to connect back to the main office if their MPLS connection failed as well as failover Internet connectivity through the MPLS network in the event that the…

Read More

Nexus FCoE Design and Configuration

Posted on by Admin

Nexus FCoE Design and Configuration I have been deploying more and more FCoE solutions on Nexus 5500s lately and thought it best to write down my design/config here for reference the next time I perform a deployment. What always throws me is that the vPC is intelligent enough to keep the FCoE VLANs isolated per FC storage best-practices (i.e. VLAN 11 on Fabric A, VLAN 12 on Fabric B), but allows the Data VLAN (i.e. VLAN…

Read More

Upgrading the Nexus 1000v to SV1(3)

Posted on by Admin

Upgrading the Nexus 1000v to SV1(3) I performed my first Nexus 1000v upgrade last week, upgrading from SV1(2) to SV1(3). It was relatively painless, but definitely worth reading about what is involved. Read on… Prerequisites: download Nexus 1000v 4.0(4)SV1(3) software save the config (copy run start) back up the config clone primary VSM virtual machine Upgrade the VSMs Do this on the primary VSM (it will automatically be synced to standby): Copy bin files to primary…

Read More

SNMP Perl Scripts

Posted on by Admin

  SNMP Perl Scripts Occasionally I need to access a switch with goofed up AAA configuration or a bunch of switches that I want to execute the same commands on.  When I used to work for a big Fortune 500 company this became more of a necessity, so I wrote the following Perl script to copy and push configuration to the devices in question.  I found myself needing this script again as I prepared hundreds…

Read More
1 … 4,042 4,043 4,044 4,045 4,046 … 4,049