Posted by: William Bell
on Jun 1, 2010
NetCraftsmen has recently been focusing efforts on aligning our UC practice with Cisco's "UC on UCS" vision. We aren't doing this simply because Cisco is taking a step in the direction of virtualization. We are doing this because it makes sense. Running Unified Communications (UC) applications in a virtual environment could be very beneficial for customers - if done correctly.
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: Jim Marinelli
on Jan 25, 2010
Cisco VSS Dual-Active Detection - In my last blog, I explained how to configure VSS. In this article I’ll explain how to configure Dual-Active Detection. This is an important function of VSS because it prevents both supervisors from becoming active in event of a VSL link failure.
A VSS pair is connected by a VSL (virtual switch link). If the standby switch detects a complete loss of the VSL, it assumes the active chassis has failed and will take over as the active chassis. However, if the link has failed but the active chassis is still functioning, this can result in both chassis being in the active state. With both chassis routing packets and connected to upstream or downstream switches, black holes can occur.
Posted by: Jim Marinelli
on Dec 21, 2009
Cisco VSS Configuration - Looking to install VSS ? Well, recently I had the opportunity to install VSS in a customer’s Data Center as part of a complete network migration from an old Nortel Switch network to a new Cisco network using primarily Catalyst 6509 switches with Sup 720 – 10 G Supervisors.
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 21, 2009
You probably know a couple of ways to use BGP in an enterprise environment. Most commonly, BGP has been used in the enterprise to provide connectivity to the Internet, supporting multihoming solutions, traffic policies, and summarization. BGP has also been used in the core of large enterprise environments as a tool to enhance network scalability and support separate administrative control domains. However, another way to use BGP in the enterprise is on a single router supporting networking virtualization with VRF-Lite. (VRF-Lite is also known as Multi-VRF).
Posted by: Carole Warner Reece
on Sep 14, 2009
I've been testing some VRF-Lite (also known as Multi VRF) configurations, and I thought I would briefly illustrate redistribution of static routes into EIGRP.
Posted by: Pete Welcher
on Aug 31, 2009
Monday 8/31/09
I've put some additional comments and updates / corrections into the Impressions #01 blog article in blue. See http://www.netcraftsmen.net/resources/blogs/vmworld-2009-impressions-01.html.
Resources 
