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, [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Yesterday after Tech Field Day there was a very good debate on Twitter and here about what a Vblock is, and more importantly, what it isn’t. Lately I’ve been so busy I haven’t blogged but this exact topic was on my short list to do when time became available. It’s a discussion I’ve had with [...]

For a long time x86 servers have been a commodity…something no one really paid attention to and innovations were few and far between.  They have gotten smaller in size…from 6U or 8U to mostly 2U and 1U…but a server today is pretty much what it was years ago with the old beige Proliants.  The only [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Cisco today announced a new technology called Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV).  Not a great name…not cool like vMotion or anything but it’s still pretty neat.  My background is heavily networking so I love the fact that the networking field is now working tightly with virtualization (and storage..but not today).  If you remember back when I [...]

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 [...]

First, if your interested in the new Cisco UCS blade system and haven’t checked out the Varrow channel on YouTube lately, you should.  We’ve added several new videos from a customer while doing their UCS install.  Pretty neat stuff.
Just finished up another video for our collection.  This one walks you through configuring Fibre Channel over [...]

Just a little FYI.  If you aren’t paying attention when configuring your port-profiles which turn in to your VMware Port Groups the default maximum number of ports is 32.  If you try to add another server you’ll get the following error:
The resource vim.dvs.DistributedVirtualPort is not available in vim.dvs.DistributedVirtualPortgroupYourPortGroupHere.
It’s an easy fix.  Just go to the [...]