Varrow Blogs

I recently have had a few people ask me what Cisco UCS adapter placement policies are used for and how/when to use them. This post will hopefully answer those questions and give a few examples. First I will start with the Cisco definition of what vNIC/vHBA placement policies are. This definition was copied from the [...]

This week I was asked to come and help do a small pilot project of the Nexus 5000 and 4000 at East Carolina University.  I was very happy to do it for two reason:  1.  I love working with the Nexus gear and especially FCoE and 2.  I just finished my Masters from ECU via [...]

I performed my first Nexus 1000v upgrade last week, upgrading from SV1(2) to SV1(3). It was relatively painless, but definitely worth reading about what is involved. Read on… Prerequisites: download Nexus 1000v 4.0(4)SV1(3) software save the config (copy run start) back up the config clone primary VSM virtual machine Upgrade the VSMs Do this on [...]

For those of you not on the vendor/reseller side of things this may not be very interesting unless you’re just curious how Cisco UCS configuration are built.  Netformix is just a tool that allows us to build these configurations and output a bill of materials that we can then place orders from.  I put together [...]

The last two days are basically a blur…  These sessions were more technical, deeper, and focused.  I had to skip the customer appreciation event on Wednesday night to study for my CCIE Routing & Switching written exam, which I very thankfully passed.  My primary focus on that isn’t to get my CCIE…at least this year. [...]

In this post I am going to walk through the northbound frame flows in the Cisco UCS system. Hopefully this information will help you better understand UCS networking. In other posts I will walk through the southbound and maybe east-west frame flows. I am breaking the posts down into multiple posts to make it easier [...]

Yeah..last year I blogged every day like a good little blogger but this week has been busier than last year.  That’s my excuse.  I figured I needed to talk a bit about what’s going on before Joe (rightfully so) reminds me.  I got here Sunday afternoon and spent most of that day just trying to [...]

Right now I’m on a flight to Las Vegas for Cisco Live 2010. Since I have time I’m looking at my session schedule for the week and continuing to juggle things to find that right balance. Too many sessions, not enough days. What jumps out at me though, are the number of sessions and amount [...]

Cisco UCS firmware 1.3 was released last week. There are lots of new features in this latest update and Dave Alexander (ucs_dave) outlined most of those in his blog post – http://www.unifiedcomputingblog.com/?p=151 What I will be covering here are the features that Dave didn’t cover nor were they mentioned in the release notes for 1.3 [...]

I just wanted to write a quick note recapping the regional VMUG we had last week in Charlotte.  This isn’t really a recap since I didn’t get to go to many of the sessions.  For a decent writeup check out Simon’s here.  But, I work for a partner and we were really busy on Friday [...]

In my previous post I discussed Cisco UCS Server Pools and use cases. In this post I will be walking through the configuration of Server Pools, Server Pool Policies and Server Pool Policy Qualifications. As stated in my previous post one of the use cases for Server Pools is in the server farm model where [...]

This is a a two part blog post on Cisco UCS Server Pools. This first post will focus on what Server Pools are and use cases and the next post will focus on configuration. Cisco UCS Server pools are one of the more mysterious features of UCS. I say mysterious because in my opinion the [...]

I attended the Cisco Partner Virtual Summit the past few days and learned a great deal about existing and up-and-coming Cisco releases in the data center. One of the sessions detailed advancements in the Nexus 1000v and new Nexus 1010 appliance. Security Right now, you probably have a great many virtual machines in your data [...]

Originally I had submitted to speak about Cisco’s Nexus 1000v virtual switch at VMworld.  A few days after I did that Cisco offered to do a joint presentation with them so that has been my focus, but long story short that may not happen as some things have changed on the Cisco side.  A lot [...]

I just wrapped up deploying the Cisco ACE module load balancer at a customer of ours. I normally wouldn’t post on something like this, but the shear void of information on the issues I ran into prompts me to do so. Hopefully some poor soul will stumble across this in aid of their deployment. The [...]