One of my readers recently submitted a comment asking me to respond to some criticisms he frequently hears about Cisco UCS. This is a pretty typical request I get from partners and perspective customers, and its a list of stuff I ‘ve seen many times before, so I thought it would be fun to address [...]
Routing over Nexus 7000 vPC peer-link? Yes and No.
December 16, 2010 By 48 Comments
Great questions on FCoE, VN-Tag, FEX, and vPC
December 9, 2010 By 35 Comments
I received some really good questions about FCoE, VN-Tag, FEX, and vPC from a reader named Lucas. Although I had 10 other things to do, I just couldn’t resist highlighting these questions, and my answers, in a new post that I thought my readers would enjoy! Brad, You have amazing information about Nexus and UCS [...]
Cisco UCS Fabric Extender (FEX) QoS
December 8, 2010 By 9 Comments
Cisco Nexus 7000 connectivity solutions for Cisco UCS
December 1, 2010 By 10 Comments
Last summer I was invited by the Nexus 7000 product management team at Cisco to help co-author a whitepaper covering general guidelines and best practices for network integration of Cisco UCS with Cisco Nexus 7000. The idea was to take a lot of the content already presented in my video series Cisco UCS Networking Best Practices (in [...]
The end to end (FCoE) justifies the means to means
November 19, 2010 By 16 Comments
I was pleasantly surprised to see that Mike Fratto, site editor and lead analyst from Network Computing, called me out in this article, with the following statement: two nodes using FCoE connected to a Nexus 2000 Fabric Extender, which is connected to a Nexus 5000, does not constitute end-to-end Ethernet FCoE because the Nexus 2000 [...]
Cisco UCS Q&A #3 – flexible configuration
October 22, 2010 By 5 Comments
This is a follow-up question from the same reader Geoff who’s original question about traffic steering was discussed here. Geoff responded to my original answer by brining up my Folly in HP vs UCS Tolly article and doubting that Cisco UCS really has active/active fabrics. Follow-up Question: Hi Brad, thank you very much for your [...]
Cisco UCS Q&A #2 – End Host Mode forwarding behavior
October 22, 2010 By 17 Comments
This question comes from a reader named Wei about how Cisco UCS behaves in End Host Mode with respect to MAC learning and flooding. Wei paints a scenario of two servers in the same VLAN, one inside Cisco UCS, the other outside of Cisco UCS. With the Fabric Interconnect in End Host Mode, what happens [...]
Cisco UCS Q&A #1 – traffic steering
October 20, 2010 By 1 Comment
This question about Cisco UCS traffic steering comes from a reader named Geoff: There is one aspect of UCS which I have been trying to understand and have not found a good explanation. Perhaps you can point me in the right direction and maybe if it is of general interest it might form the basis [...]
Cisco UCS Fabric Failover: Slam Dunk? or So What?
September 23, 2010 By 26 Comments
Fabric Failover is a unique capability found only in Cisco UCS that allows a server adapter to have a highly available connection to two redundant network switches without any NIC teaming drivers or any NIC failover configuration required in the OS, hypervisor, or virtual machine. In this article we will take a brief look at [...]
VMware 10GE QoS Design Deep Dive with Cisco UCS, Nexus
September 15, 2010 By 38 Comments
Last month I wrote a brief article discussing the intelligent QoS capabilities of Cisco UCS in a VMware 10GE scenario, accompanied by some flash animations for visual learners like me. In that article I (intentionally) didn’t get too specific with design details or technical nuance. Rather, I wanted to set the stage first with a [...]
Nexus 1000V’s 17 load balancing algorithms, dedicated to Nicholas Weaver at EMC
August 31, 2010 By 9 Comments
I wanted to take a few minutes to point out the 17 different load balancing algorithms available when distributing traffic from a VMware vSphere ESX host to a network of clustered upstream switches. Normally I don’t write blogs on such short topics but this one has a little story behind it. This week I am [...]
Cisco UCS intelligent QoS vs. HP Virtual Connect rate limiting
August 16, 2010 By 26 Comments
This article is a simple examination of the fundamental differences in how server bandwidth is handled between the Cisco UCS approach of QoS (quality of service), and the HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 / FlexFabric approach of Rate Limiting. I created two simple flash animations shown below to make the comparison. The animations above are each [...]
Cisco UCS Networking Best Practices (in HD)
June 22, 2010 By 46 Comments
UPDATE 3/8/2011: This video series has been obsoleted by a new and updated series posted here: Cisco UCS Networking videos (in HD), Updated & Improved! This is a presentation I developed covering networking best practices for Cisco UCS, and now have recorded in High Definition for your viewing pleasure! Sweet! This presentation assumes familiarity with [...]
Data Center Networking Q&A #1 – starring HP, Nexus 1000V, QoS
June 3, 2010 By 9 Comments
I thought it would be fun to pilot a series of posts where I pick out interesting search engine queries that were used to find my blog. Often times these are good questions that deserve a good answer, or other interesting topics that can start a good discussion or fun debate. This particular series will [...]
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