Posted by: Carole Warner Reece
on Jun 30, 2010
Denise and I are networking here with John Chambers at CiscoLive yesterday evening after the CCIE NetVet reception.

We noticed that Denise and I were the only two female CCIE NetVets in the room, so are hoping next year to instigate a breakfast birds-of-a-feather for women in networking at CiscoLive Networkers 2011.
Posted by: Carole Warner Reece
on Apr 15, 2010
Tagged in:
VRF-Lite ,
VNO ,
virtualization ,
Virtual Network Overlay ,
medical grade network ,
healthcare network ,
health care QoS ,
health care network design ,
fusion router ,
converged network ,
clinical network ,
clinical life critical ,
clinical data ,
Cisco NAC Profiler ,
BNAC ,
biomedical NAC
NetCraftsmen has been supporting several customers with designs and implementations of 'Medical Grade Networks'. Steve Meyer and I thought we should discuss an example health care network design that uses converged networks to support 'medical grade networks' using VRF-Lite, biomedical NAC, and health care QoS class definitions.
Posted by: Carole Warner Reece
on Apr 1, 2010
I've been looking at migrating some customers' Catalyst 4500 and Catalyst 6500 switches to Nexus 7000 switches. I thought I would write up a comparison of common commands as an aid for the networking team.
Posted by: Carole Warner Reece
on Mar 11, 2010
Tagged in:
test ,
snmp ,
network monitoring ,
network management ,
network health ,
network discovery ,
network analysis ,
NetMRI trial ,
NetMRI ,
diagnostic tools ,
device groups ,
device discovery ,
device configuration ,
configuration management
Because NetCraftsmen is now offering a free 30 dial trial of Netcordia's NetMRI software (at Netcordia NetMRI 4 Trial Download), we have had some recent discussions on the best way to run a trial.
Posted by: Carole Warner Reece
on Feb 10, 2010
One of my friends asked me recently if he had too much redundancy. He was concerned about potential issues in having multiple equal cost paths from his Unified Communications Manager to his IP phones, and between IP phones in different locations. (In his case, he is running EIGRP and has up to 4 equal cost paths.)
Posted by: Carole Warner Reece
on Dec 10, 2009
I just finished reading a brief interview that Terry Slattery did with Train Signal Training on Cisco Certifications, Careers, Training and More (link to the interview).
As usual, I find Terry's comments and advice are worth reviewing. He discusses the value of certifications as well as changes in the certification process in the networking industry. He touches on various types of training and training resources, and talks a bit more about CCIE, CCDE, and the new CCA options from Cisco.
Posted by: Carole Warner Reece
on Oct 21, 2009
Tagged in:
VRF-Lite ,
VRF ,
virtualization ,
static routes ,
shared services ,
redistribution ,
Multi-VRF ,
fusion router ,
EIGRP ,
design ,
data center
Part 2 of my experiments with VRF-Lite, which provides more thoughts on whether the customer edge (CE) device should run one or more VRFs. (Part 1 is available here CE Design Options When Using VRF-Lite End-to-End, and discusses using the CE as a "fusion" router to support dynamic routing the customer routing process(es) with the shared service VRFs by using multiple EIGRP processes on the CE without any VRFs.)
Posted by: Carole Warner Reece
on Oct 18, 2009
Tagged in:
VRF-Lite ,
VRF ,
virtualization ,
static routes ,
shared services ,
redistribution ,
Multi-VRF ,
fusion router ,
fusion ,
EIGRP ,
design ,
data center
I've been testing some end-to-end VRF-Lite configurations, and I've been thinking about whether the customer edge (CE) device should run one or more VRFs. Like many design choices in networking, the decision to run VRFs on your CE devices depends on your application and your network.
Posted by: Carole Warner Reece
on Oct 5, 2009
I've been reviewing the VMware vSphere 4.0 architecture, and in the process put together the following introduction glossary.
Note: This includes just the terms I found useful this morning...
Posted by: Carole Warner Reece
on Sep 28, 2009
I've recently been looking at BGP designs using route reflectors (RR). As a best practice for RR designs, the logical iBGP sessions should follow the physical topology. But what could happen if you don't follow this practice?