Brad, can you elaborate on Cisco’s Jawbreaker project? What exactly is it? Is it a response to Juniper’s Q-Fabric? Is it an attempt to rectify the inconsistencies in the differing purpose-built approaches of the N7K and N5K? Why create a new architecture? It seems like Cisco is really in trouble – creating a new architecture, [...]
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 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The vSwitch ILLUSION and DMZ virtualization
February 10, 2010 By 23 Comments
Server virtualization has gained tremendous popularity and acceptance to a point now that customers are staring to host virtual machines from differing security zones on the same physical Host machine. Physical servers that were self contained in their own DMZ network environment are now being migrated to a virtual machine resting on a single physical [...]
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 [...]
Nexus 5000 & Nexus 2000: New technology requires new thinking
February 9, 2010 By 9 Comments
I sometimes hear or read complaints about the Nexus 5000 + Nexus 2000 fabric extender architecture that I want to take a minute to address. This should be short and sweet, a blogging concept that is foreign to me if you follow my work. The typical complaints about this architecture from network engineers are as [...]
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 [...]
Cisco UCS and Nexus 1000V design diagram with Palo adapter
August 11, 2009 By 44 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 [...]
Top of Rack vs End of Row Data Center Designs
April 5, 2009 By 27 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 [...]
Brocade buys Foundry, validating Cisco Data Center Strategy
July 21, 2008 By 4 Comments
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