Varrow Blogs

What a long day. I’m beat. I’ve been in San Francisco for a week now. I had to fly in last Monday for my VCDX defense in Palo Alto…. I’m already starting to feel drained from being on the other side of the country from home. Today was the first day of VMworld, you know, [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

Usually deploying the Nexus 1000v virtual switch has gone without a hitch in the many I’ve completed. I’m at a customer site and we deployed the Nexus 1000v to their production environment without incident. We’re deploying the 1000v to their disaster recovery environment as well and began running into issues. The hosts that we’ve deployed [...]

In one of my earlier blog posts, I touched on how the Nexus 1000v serves as the access switch in the Core, Distribution, Access Layer model of networking. Prior to the 1000v, the vSwitch on the ESX hosts served as the access switch, creating an additional access layer and removing visibility for the network engineers. [...]

I’m wrapping up another deployment of the Nexus 1000v and licensing it. Licensing the 1000v isn’t as intuitive as I had hoped, so read on… Obtaining the License You probably have a list of Serial Numbers/Activation Codes from VMware for use with the 1000v — one for each CPU socket on each host that will [...]

Lately I’ve been working on several implementations of the Cisco Nexus 1000v.  While doing so we’ve hit a couple of annoying bugs.  The first one was in a pretty simple environment.  The customer had a number of vSphere hosts with six NICs connected to a single uplink used for VM traffic.  The six NICs were [...]

Yesterday we were deploying the Nexus 1000v SV1(2) and found a bug (well, Cisco knows about it, but we didn’t). If you manage physical adapters under the dvSwitch menu in vCenter and remove an interface from an uplink and then re-add that same interface to another uplink, vCenter will show that the links are up, [...]

I just finished up another installation of the Nexus 1000v at a customer site a few days ago and thought it a fitting time to talk about what the Nexus 1000v has to bring to the table. The Background A little background in the Nexus 1000v is in order. The 1000v is just a virtual [...]

Uh oh. Something just happened to your VSM (Virtual Supervisor Module). Maybe the config was cleared or the entire (or both) VMs are gone and you don’t have a backup. How can you recover your now orphaned distributed switch? It’s not as hard as you’d think. This recently happened to me. Through an unusual chain [...]

We’re starting to see a serious uptake in interest in deploying the Nexus 1000v virtual distributed switch.  I believe the latest service release calmed some fears about this new product and having some references to point at always helps.  As we perform more implementations we’re starting to see some things that customers need to be [...]

This is an update and bit of a rewrite of an earlier post I made here.  I wanted to add more detail and information now that I’ve worked with the Nexus 1000v more.
If you’ve read a lot of the Varrow blogs you’ll see information and talk about Cisco’s Nexus technology and products.  To be blunt, [...]

On Friday Cisco finally released something I’ve been waiting on…version 1.2 of the Nexus 1000v virtual switch. This should fix a bug I’ve hit as well as add some nice new features, included a GUI for the initial configuration of the VSM.  The update is, of course, free to existing customers.
The new features include:

GUI [...]

Power supplies aren’t the most exciting thing to talk about…but have you ever arrived to install new gear and found that the plug in your hand didn’t match the outlet on the wall? Then it gets real exciting…. The great thing about Cisco is they have a module and a cable to make anything talk [...]