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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Booting UCS C from FlexFlash

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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…

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DMVPN as a Redundant Network Solution

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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…

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Nexus FCoE Design and Configuration

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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…

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Upgrading the Nexus 1000v to SV1(3)

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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…

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