How to Calculate TCP throughput for long distance WAN links

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So you just lit up your new high-speed link between Data Centers but are unpleasantly surprised to see relatively slow file transfers across this high speed, long distance link — Bummer! Before you call Cisco TAC and start trouble shooting your network, do a quick calculation of what you should realistically expect in terms of TCP throughput from a one host to another over this long distance link. When using TCP to transfer data the…

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Cisco UCS B-Series NIC Teaming & Bonding OS Support Matrices

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Cisco UCS B-Series NIC Teaming & Bonding OS Support Matrices An unsupported teaming type for the Cisco UCS B200 blade server. Their discussion made me realize that there wasn’t an easy-to-find resource for Cisco UCS customers that needed to know “OS Team Types Supported Per UCS Network Adapter” and “Unsupported Team Types”. Below you will find both of these resources. I’ve listed a chart per Cisco UCS B-Series Network Adapter that shows the teaming/bonding types that…

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Distributed virtual and physical routing in VMware NSX for vSphere

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Distributed virtual and physical routing in VMware NSX for vSphere This post is intended to be a primer on the distributed routing in VMware NSX for vSphere, using a basic scenario of L3 forwarding between both virtual and physical subnets. I’m not going to bore you with all of the laborious details, just the stuff that matters for the purpose of this discussion. In VMware NSX for vSphere there are two different types of NSX routers you can deploy in your virtual network. The NSX Edge Services Router (ESR) The…

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UCS 2.0: Cisco Stacks the Deck in Las Vegas

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Original Link # http://www.mseanmcgee.com/2011/07/ucs-2-0-cisco-stacks-the-deck-in-las-vegas/ In addition to the existing UCS fabric hardware, UCS customers now have a choice of a new Fabric Interconnect, a new chassis I/O module, and a new Virtual Interface Card.  The 6248UP Fabric Interconnect delivers double the throughput, almost half the latency, and more than quadruple the virtual interfaces per downlink, while the new 2208XP chassis I/O module delivers double the chassis uplink bandwidth and quadruple the server downlinks.  Last but not…

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New design guide: VMware NSX with Cisco UCS and Nexus 7000

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New design guide: VMware NSX with Cisco UCS and Nexus 7000   why you would deploy VMware NSX with your Cisco UCS and Nexus gear.  The gist being that NSX adds business agility, a rich set of virtual network services, and orders of magnitude better performance and scale to these existing platforms.  The response to this piece was phenomenal with many people asking for more details on the how. The choice is clear.  To obtain a…

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

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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…

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Cisco UCS Boot From SAN Video Walktrough

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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…

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Disable vMotion for a single VM

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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,…

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vCenter 5.5 Upgrade with Windows Server 2012 R2

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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…

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FCoE – Waiting for flogi…

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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…

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