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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 basic networking and server VNIC concepts in UCS, and familiarity with virtual port channels.
This version of the presentation (v2.5) focuses primarily on the Ethernet [...]

As data centers become increasingly dynamic and dense with virtualization – how the classic Ethernet switching design adopts to these new models and scales becomes an important and challenging question. Virtualization and cloud based services says that any workload can exist anywhere, at anytime, on demand, and move to any location without disruption. This is [...]

Tags: TRILL

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.