WOW! Being in the technology business for over 12 years, I admit it’s hard to get excited over new product announcements. Most of the time it’s minor tweaks and updates to the hardware platforms, faster processors, better performance, increased scale, new coat of paint and polish to the OS. You know the norm. I was thinking this would be the story for Apple’s WWDC today, but boy was I wrong about the Mac Pro. Apple went ahead and gave firm…
Hello once again! Today I decided to talk about some Cisco innovations around of UCS platform. I’m going to try my best to keep this post high-level and EASY to understand as most things “virtual” can get fairly complex. First up is Virtual Interface Card (VIC). This is Cisco’s answer to 1:1 mapped blade mezzanine cards in blade servers and other “virtual connectivity” mezzanine solutions. Instead of having a single MEZZ/NIC mapped to a specific internal/external switch/interconnect we developed a vNIC optimized for virtualized…
Hi Cisco friends! I had a great question from a customer today regarding failure scenarios and vPC. On the surface, I thought this is an easy one. However, when I really gave it deep thought it really depends on the type of failure. Was the failure on the peer-link, peer keepalive, vPC member port, or the worst case dual active/double failure? Let’s go through some of the failure examples. vPC Member Port Failure If one vPC member port goes down – for…
Feb 24, 1955 – Oct 5th 2011 http://www.apple.com
I got something very cool last week. It came overnight from my good friend Frank in NY. What we have here is a very special privilege folks. It’s a prototype of the Nexus 3548 ultra low latency switch using our custom ASIC called Algo Boost/Monticello. Instead of killing you with all the details I decided to create a video of the un-boxing and special features walkthrough. Enjoy! https://www.youtube.com/user/4g1vn/featured
I recently had one of my customers asked about private VLANs and the benefits/use cases. I thought this was a good opportunity to refresh my knowledge of PVLANs because it was a weak area of mine during my last CCIE lab. What are Private VLANs? The main objective with PVLANs is conserving IP space, but still allowing L2 separation for security purposes. Typically, VLAN design calls for a single IP subnet for each VLAN. Here we are able to create multiple (secondary VLAN/s) VLANs for isolation, but…
It’s been way too long since I posted on my blog. Well, I have been studying for the CCIE Data Center lab and wanted to pass on some very critical information on fabric extender (FEX) configurations. One of the most common questions that our Cisco friends ask me is “Why do I need to create a port channel for the FEX-Fabric links?”. Well let’s dive into the WHY, and then explore the HOW. Let’s first start with a foundation on what FEX is and how it…
Well deserved kudos to Google. Their browser is the best in the business. It’s about time that junk of a browser (IE) is dethroned. http://www.businessinsider.com/google-overtakes-internet-explorer-as-most-popular-browser-2012-5
IP Services ARP: ARP is the process of resolving unknown L2 (MAC) information FROM known L3 (IP) information. Inverse ARP is learning unknown L3 (IP) information from known L2 (DLCI) information. Proxy ARP, as defined in RFC 1027, was implemented to enable devices that are separated into physical network segments connected by a router in the same IP network or subnetwork to resolve the IP-to-MAC addresses. When devices are not in the same data link layer network but in the…
So, it’s been over a week since my last lab attempt and I have had plenty of time to reflect. I will say that I underestimated the troubleshooting section considerably. My advise is when you hit a difficult question, do not linger on it, move on and try to come back if you have time. It’s hard to assess which tickets are the challenging ones without a little investigation. I will say that if you cannot solve the ticket within 10-15 minutes… MOVE ON. Next…