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 14 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 [...]
VMware 10GE QoS Design Deep Dive with Cisco UCS, Nexus
September 15, 2010 By 37 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 [...]
HP Flex-10 versus Nexus 5000 & Nexus 1000V with 10GE passthrough
February 9, 2010 By 38 Comments
I had an interesting discussion with a customer the other day where both Cisco (myself included) and HP account teams where on the same call to discuss Flex-10, Nexus 1000V, or other approaches that may work better. — Yeah, awkward. Anyway, for most of the time we (the Cisco team) focused on Flex-10′s total lack [...]
Simple use cases for Network Interface Virtualization
October 23, 2009 By 8 Comments
My most recent post Simple Example of Network Interface Virtualization generated enough interest and curosity to warrant a follow-up post showing simple uses cases for NIV. NIV takes a single physical adapter and presents multiple virtual adapters as if they were physical adapters to the server and network. Now that the server and network see [...]
A simple example of Network Interface Virtualization
October 23, 2009 By 2 Comments
I’m seeing some confusion in the blogosphere about how Cisco’s implementation of Network Interface Virtualization (NIV) really works so perhaps a very simple example is needed, and that is the intent of this post. My previous posts about NIV with Cisco’s Palo adapter were focused on the big picture and the complete solution, such as [...]
Cisco UCS and Nexus 1000V design diagram with Palo adapter
August 11, 2009 By 43 Comments
This is a follow-up and enhancement of a previous design diagram in which I showed Cisco UCS running the standard VMware vSwitch. In this post I am once again showing Cisco UCS utilizing the Cisco (Palo) virtualized adapter with an implementation of VMware vSphere 4.0, however in this design we are running ESXi and the [...]
Cisco UCS and VMWare vSwitch design with Cisco 10GE Virtual Adapter
July 5, 2009 By 26 Comments
This diagram is a sample design of Cisco UCS running vSphere 4.0 utilizing the VMWare vSwitch and Cisco’s virtualization mezzanine adapter. The Cisco adapter is a dual port 10GE Converged Network Adapter supporting Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Network Interface Virtualization (NIV). The Cisco adapter is “virtual” in the sense that this single physical [...]
Top of Rack vs End of Row Data Center Designs
April 5, 2009 By 25 Comments
VMotion on steroids with FCoE
August 14, 2008 By 5 Comments
Want lightning fast VMotion? Just install a CNA (Converged Network Adapter) from Emulex or QLogic and connect it to a Cisco Nexus 5000. Mario Apicella of InfoWorld did just that and writes: “I had intended to post a movie clip of the test VM moving to the new ESX server using VMotion, but the action [...]
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