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Construct a Leaf Spine design with 40G or 10G? An observation in scaling the fabric.

January 25, 2012 By 17 Comments

Should you construct a Leaf/Spine fabric with 10G or 40G? In this post I’ll make the simple observation that using 10G interfaces in your leaf/spine fabric scales to more servers than using 40G interfaces, all with the same hardware, bandwidth, and oversubscription. Let’s suppose you’ve decided to build a Leaf/Spine fabric for your data center [...]

Filed Under: Design Diagrams, Fabrics, Routing, TRILL

Hadoop network design challenge

November 5, 2011 By 23 Comments

I had a bit of fun recently working on a hypothetical network design for a large scale Hadoop implementation.  A friend of mine mentioned he was responding to a challenging RFP, and when I asked him more about it out of curiosity he sent me these requirements: (4) Containers In each Container: (25) Racks (64) [...]

Filed Under: Big Data, Design Diagrams, Hadoop

Routing over Nexus 7000 vPC peer-link? Yes and No.

December 16, 2010 By 34 Comments

This is a Nexus 7000 design question that comes up from time to time: In a Nexus 7000 Vpc environment, how can I form a layer 3 adjency between the two switches. Lets say I want to run OSPF and want to create two SVIs on the two switches connected via Vpc, Will the neighborship [...]

Filed Under: Design Diagrams, Nexus, Routing, vPC

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 [...]

Filed Under: Cisco UCS, Design Diagrams, FCoE, Featured, Nexus, NIV, QoS, VMware

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 [...]

Filed Under: Cisco UCS, Design Diagrams, FCoE, Featured, VMware

Top of Rack vs End of Row Data Center Designs

April 5, 2009 By 25 Comments

This article provides a close examination and comparison of two popular data center physical designs, “Top of Rack” and “End of Row”. We will also explore a new alternative design using Fabric Extenders, and finish off with a quick look at how Cisco Unified Computing might fit into this picture.

Filed Under: Cisco UCS, Design Diagrams, FCoE, Featured, FEX, Nexus, Switching