Posted by: Carole Warner Reece
on May 4, 2012
[Guest article from my friend Dominic Basta. Thanks again, Dominic!]
I thought I'd share my experiences working with switch profiles on Cisco Nexus 5000 switches. Cisco suggests using switch profiles for the following reasons:
• Allows configurations to be synchronized between switches.
• Merges configurations when connectivity is established between two switches.
• Provides control of exactly which configuration gets synchronized.
• Ensures configuration consistency across peers through merge and mutual-exclusion checks.
• Provides verify and commit semantics.
• Supports configuring and synchronizing port profile configurations.
• Provides an import command to migrate existing vPC configurations to a switch profile.
I decided to test setting Switch Profiles up to provide a single point of configuration change for our bowtie setup Nexus 5548s and 2232 FEX. The switch profiles would protect us from vPC misconfigurations and insure configuration redundancy across the parent switches.
Posted by: Paul Smith
on May 1, 2012
Under certain circumstances, when opening Outlook on a Windows computer, ViewMail may throw the following error:
Posted by: Pete Welcher
on Apr 30, 2012
Are you planning to use a Nexus 2000 FEX with one of the new F2 cards in a Nexus 7000? If so, there are some rules about how it connect it up, apparently due to limitations of the SoC (Switch on Chip) technology Cisco is using. I'll call this a "design awkwardness" rather than "bug" or "gotcha". This goes on my list of "Nexus things you need to know and remember or they might bite you some day". This one isn't a big deal, more of an "oops, got to rethink this".
Posted by: Carole Warner Reece
on Apr 24, 2012
The newer versions of NX-OS support 1G or 10G on the N5K, but the N5K is not auto-speed sensing. A mini case study follows.
Posted by: Ron Trunk
on Apr 13, 2012
Tagged in: Untagged
Here is my list of the top ten security mistakes that IT staff makes. These mistakes leave your network vulnerable to attack and compromise. Mistake #3: No Layer Two Protections.
Posted by: Pete Welcher
on Apr 9, 2012
I just heard something you might want to know about the Cisco Nexus 7000 F2 Card. That got me motivated to post some thoughts and questions I have about this interesting new linecard for the Nexus 7000. To cut to the chase, here's the key infonugget, something I heard from a savvy Cisco source: the FCoE functionality for the F2 card will require a Sup2 and licensing.
Posted by: William Bell
on Apr 6, 2012
I just finished wrapping up all of the logistics for a trip I am making at the end of the month to beautiful San Jose, CA. I will be representing Chesapeake NetCraftsmen at the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) 2012 annual conference. A few years ago, a group of NetCraftsmen consultants had the ability to work with a large university healthcare system to design a solution for providing an end-to-end Cisco Telepresence solution.
Posted by: Carole Warner Reece
on Apr 3, 2012
Coming up for the April 10, 2012 Cisco Mid-Atlantic User Group (C-MUG) session, Terry Slattery, CCIE #1026, will be presenting a discussion on how you can protect your business applications from video. He will be describing methods for preventing video from having a large negative impact on the other network applications.
In addition to the video discussion, Terry will be also be discussing TCP "goodput". He will cover the thresholds that network management systems should use for packet loss thresholds in order to assure good TCP throughput ("TCP goodput") and optimum application response.
Registration information and more details are available on the C-MUG Apr 2012: Stop Video From Blowing Up Your Network with Terry Slattery page.
Posted by: Ron Trunk
on Apr 2, 2012
Here is my list of the top ten security mistakes that IT staff makes. These mistakes leave your network vulnerable to attack and compromise. Mistake #4: Internet Access For Servers.
Posted by: Pete Welcher
on Mar 28, 2012
I've recently been discussing Security in the Datacenter with a consulting customer. Their security folks are getting a lot of management support in one of the more stringent security pushes I've seen to date. The security team fell in love with Palo Alto Networks firewalls (UTM's), bought some big ones, and want to stick them in the middle of the datacenter, controlling not only all traffic between users and servers, but within the datacenter. They also feel they should become the default gateway for all servers, and while they're at it, might as well take over doing the routing for the datacenter. (None of this is necessarily a Palo Alto Networks problem, I've run into similar things with other brands, including Cisco.)
