I wrote this post not only to put out some information on one of the least-understood facets of networking (especially in data center, as most technology today is aimed at making STP irrelevant) but also to help get something on paper for me, seeing as I am going down the CCIE path full force now, and this has always been a weak area of mine. This post will assume you have CCNP-level knowledge about Spanning Tree Protocol (STP).
I mentioned in a previous post regarding the connectivity options to each blade if you’re using the appropriate hardware.
If you’re using a 2208 FEX, you have 8 upstream ports, each at 10GbE. This means the FEX can support up to 80 Gbps total. You can provide potentially 4:1 oversubscription (math later) to each blade by connecting a 2208 FEX into a blade chassis with blades that can also support 80Gbps each.
I mentioned in a previous post regarding the connectivity options to each blade if you’re using the appropriate hardware.
If you’re using a 2208 FEX, you have 8 upstream ports, each at 10GbE. This means the FEX can support up to 80 Gbps total. You can provide potentially 4:1 oversubscription (math later) to each blade by connecting a 2208 FEX into a blade chassis with blades that can also support 80Gbps each.
Cisco UCS offers a few policies that are applied globally to all equipment in a given UCS domain. These policies are found by selecting the “Equipment” node under the “equipment” tab. (You can also change on an individual chassis basis but the default behavior is for all chassis to inherit this global policy)
This is specifically referring to the connectivity between the Fabric Interconnects and the Chassis FEX modules or I/O modules (IOM).
I was introduced by a colleague and mentor a few years ago to the concept of powerless words. Words like “try”, “but”, and “maybe/might”, among others, seem to be our mind’s way of protecting itself against the unknown. After all, we’re only human, right? We can’t control what the world throws at us, right?
I encourage you to read the article I linked to as well as this one, which the first article refers to.
Cisco UCS offers a few policies that are applied globally to all equipment in a given UCS domain. These policies are found by selecting the “Equipment” node under the “equipment” tab. (You can also change on an individual chassis basis but the default behavior is for all chassis to inherit this global policy)
This is specifically referring to the connectivity between the Fabric Interconnects and the Chassis FEX modules or I/O modules (IOM).
I was introduced by a colleague and mentor a few years ago to the concept of powerless words. Words like “try”, “but”, and “maybe/might”, among others, seem to be our mind’s way of protecting itself against the unknown. After all, we’re only human, right? We can’t control what the world throws at us, right?
I encourage you to read the article I linked to as well as this one, which the first article refers to.
To say that Ethernet as a L2 protocol is well-known is an understatement - it’s in every PC network card, and every network closet. Back during the inception of Ethernet, the world needed an open, efficient, standardized method of communicating between nodes on a LAN. Widely regarded as the “mother of the Internet” for many reasons - not the least of which is the invention of the Spanning Tree Protocol - Radia Perlman equated the wide proliferation of Ethernet to the same events that have made English such as popular language on Earth.
Name: UltimateUCSBuild.ps1
Author: Matthew Oswalt
Created: 6/10/2013
Current Version: v0.2 (ALPHA)
Revision Date: 6/18/2013
Description:
–THIS SCRIPT IS VERY NEW, EXPECT FREQUENT CHANGES AND IMPROVEMENTS–
A script that starts with a completely blank UCS system and configures it to completion.
This version of the script is very non-modular and static, but that will change in future versions.
My long-term vision for this script is to be simple, yet powerful. I want it to have the ability to provision lots of stuff very quickly, with minimal code changes.
To say that Ethernet as a L2 protocol is well-known is an understatement - it’s in every PC network card, and every network closet. Back during the inception of Ethernet, the world needed an open, efficient, standardized method of communicating between nodes on a LAN. Widely regarded as the “mother of the Internet” for many reasons - not the least of which is the invention of the Spanning Tree Protocol - Radia Perlman equated the wide proliferation of Ethernet to the same events that have made English such as popular language on Earth.
Name: UltimateUCSBuild.ps1
Author: Matthew Oswalt
Created: 6/10/2013
Current Version: v0.2 (ALPHA)
Revision Date: 6/18/2013
Description:
–THIS SCRIPT IS VERY NEW, EXPECT FREQUENT CHANGES AND IMPROVEMENTS–
A script that starts with a completely blank UCS system and configures it to completion.
This version of the script is very non-modular and static, but that will change in future versions.
My long-term vision for this script is to be simple, yet powerful. I want it to have the ability to provision lots of stuff very quickly, with minimal code changes.
A while back I wrote about the problems with using some of the newer 3rd generation blade hardware from Cisco with older generations of the chassis FEX/IOM. Because of the way that the VIC and the chassis IOM interact, certain combinations yield different amounts of aggregate bandwidth, and certain combinations don’t work at all, as was evidenced in that post.
As a reminder, here are the valid combinations (these are still accurate to my knowledge, but may change in a few weeks if any new tech is announced at Cisco Live) of FEX and blade VIC:
A while back I wrote about the problems with using some of the newer 3rd generation blade hardware from Cisco with older generations of the chassis FEX/IOM. Because of the way that the VIC and the chassis IOM interact, certain combinations yield different amounts of aggregate bandwidth, and certain combinations don’t work at all, as was evidenced in that post.
As a reminder, here are the valid combinations (these are still accurate to my knowledge, but may change in a few weeks if any new tech is announced at Cisco Live) of FEX and blade VIC:
Many of those that have supported a vSphere-based virtualization infrastructure for any length of time have probably heard of the Cisco Nexus 1000v. I’ve written a few posts that mention it, and I’ve been deploying the product quite successfully for the past few years. Even cooler, the Nexus 1000v is now available for Hyper-V as well.
For those that are not familiar with the idea of distributed switches in general, I’ll overview the concept briefly.
Many of those that have supported a vSphere-based virtualization infrastructure for any length of time have probably heard of the Cisco Nexus 1000v. I’ve written a few posts that mention it, and I’ve been deploying the product quite successfully for the past few years. Even cooler, the Nexus 1000v is now available for Hyper-V as well.
For those that are not familiar with the idea of distributed switches in general, I’ll overview the concept briefly.
About a year and a half ago, arguably well before the biggest of all the SDN hype that we’ve come to know and love, Stephen Foskett and company organized a fantastic OpenFlow Symposium aimed at getting deep into the state of the protocol at that time and what was being done with it at some of the leading tech companies like Google, Yahoo, Cisco, Brocade, and others.
For those keeping track, Dave Meyer was on the panel at the time representing Cisco but is now CTO and Chief Scientist with Brocade and getting to do some really cool stuff with OpenDaylight.