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 [...]
Great questions on FCoE, VN-Tag, FEX, and vPC
December 9, 2010 By 30 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
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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