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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SNMP Perl Scripts

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  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…

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Setting Up Alert Notification of Server Status Changes in Cisco Unity Connection

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Setting Up Alert Notification of Server Status Changes in Cisco Unity Connection We recommend that you configure the Cisco Unified Real-Time Monitoring Tool to send notifications for the following Cisco Unity Connection alerts: AutoFailbackFailed AutoFailbackSucceeded AutoFailoverFailed AutoFailoverSucceeded NoConnectionToPeer SbrFailed   More info # http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/connection/9x/cluster_administration/guide/9xcuccagx/9xcuccag005.html

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Cisco Nexus B22HP FEX Deployment Guide

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Cisco Nexus B22HP FEX Deployment Guide It seems that Cisco hasn’t completed ticked off HP with their UCS line of servers, because they were able to collaborate on a fabric extender for the HP C-series chassis, the Nexus B22HP.  A fabric extender is a Cisco Nexus switch (typically a Nexus 2000) that is managed via an upstream Nexus 5500 switch.  It allows you to scale out your top of rack (TOR) switches and still manage them…

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Cisco UCS Direct-Attached SAN

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Cisco UCS Direct-Attached SAN New in Cisco UCS firmware 2.1 is the ability to directly-attached a fiber-channel SAN to the Fabric Interconnects; to see all the other cool features head on over to UCS Guru’s blog.  A few years ago, Cisco supported this very briefly before changing their minds because your sole method of governing access to the SAN was LUN Masking and not zoning.  In firmware 2.1 Cisco flipped the switch and added support for…

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VXLAN

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So what is VXLAN and why do we need it? Well put simply it’s VLAN with an X in the middle 🙂 the X standing for eXtensible. VXLAN was a joint project between Cisco, VMware, Redhat and Citrix which is why it has been so widely adopted, and underpins the majority of SDN offerings. And as to why we need it, well that’s mainly to address two limitations of using regular VLANs. Scale and Flexibility….

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Cisco UCS has had a baby (Mother and Daughterboard doing well)

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As many of you know I am now in full CCIE Datacenter study mode, and as such, I never seem to have as much time to blog and answer posted questions as I would like. However I felt compelled to take a break from my studies to write a post on the new Cisco UCS generation 3 Fabric Interconnect. I noticed the other day that Cisco have released the data sheet on the latest member…

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