Author Archives: Jeremy Waldrop
Nexus 5500 FCoE and Jumbo MTU
I happened across an interesting scenario this morning while I was doing configuring jumbo MTU of 9216 on the Nexus 5500 switches in our lab. I wanted to enable jumbo frames and with Nexus 5500s you have to do this with a QoS policy map. Here are the s...
Posted in Cisco Nexus, Cisco UCS, Nexus, NX-OS, UCS Comments closed
Cisco UCS Multihop FCoE QoS Gotcha
See my post on configuration and migration to multihop FCoE for details on my lab setup – http://jeremywaldrop.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/cisco-ucs-fcoe-multihop-configuration-and-migration/ When I first configured UCS multihop FCoE I experienced t...
Posted in Cisco Nexus, Cisco UCS, FCoE, Nexus, UCS Comments closed
Cisco UCS FCoE Multihop Configuration and Migration
This post will walk through the configuration of FCoE multihop in UCS and cover how to migrate from traditional FC to FCoE. The diagram below is an example of the topology we have in our lab. We opted for dedicated FCoE links instead of sharing the nor...
Posted in Cisco Nexus, Cisco UCS, Nexus, UCS Comments closed
vSphere 5.1 Distributed Switch Health Check and Cisco UCS
I was doing some testing of the new vSphere 5.1 features and came across something odd with the new Distributed Switch Health Check feature with Cisco UCS. In my lab I have 4 ESXi 5.1 hosts running on older B200 M1s with VIC M81KR adaptors. On my ESXi ...
Cisco UCS Firmware 2.1 – New Features Overview
Cisco released UCS Firmware 2.1 last weekend with a host of new features. Along with this update the UCS Central management software was also released. This post will summarize most of the new features, I left out the less exciting/ground breaking feat...
Posted in Cisco Nexus, Cisco UCS, Nexus, UCS Comments closed
Cisco DCNM Rocks
I am not sure why I waited so long to check out DCNM but I wish I hadn’t because DNCM Rocks!! For those of you that don’t know DCNM is management software for monitoring, configuring and troubleshooting the following Cisco Nexus and MDS switches. &...
Posted in Cisco Nexus, DCNM, Nexus, NX-OS Comments closed
Nexus 5500 SAN Admin RBAC
It’s been a while since I have posted anything on my blog. I just haven’t had the motivation to do it. The current unified fabric project I am working on and the newly released CCIE DC has sparked a renewed interest in digging deeper into NX-OS. As...
Posted in Cisco Nexus, Nexus, NX-OS Comments closed
Custom ESXi 5 ISO for UCS, Nexus 1000v and PowerPath VE
With ESXi 5 VMware made it very easy to create custom installation ISOs. I have been doing a lot of upgrades from ESXi 4.1 in our customer sites that have UCS, Nexus 1000v and PowerPath VE so I decided to create a custom ISO that includes the current U...
ESXi 4.1 to 5 Upgrades with VUM
I have been doing a lot of ESXi 4.1 to 5 upgrades of late and every time I tried using vCenter Update Manager I would get an incompatible driver warning for these 2 ESXi 4.1 driver packages oem-vmware-esx-drivers-scsi-3w-9xxx oem-vmware-esx-drivers-net...
Posted in VMware Comments closed
Cisco UCS PowerShell Configuration Script
As a follow up from yesterday’s post (UCS PowerShell Health check HTML report) I figured I would post a video demonstrating a UCS configuration script that I just finished. The video starts with me showing an un-configured UCS cluster, I go through a...
Cisco UCS PowerShell Health Check Report
I have been slack on my blog posts of late, mostly because of motivation but I have also been very busy with very little free time to spare. I like being busy and I have been working on some cool projects, mostly with UCS, Nexus, vSphere and EMC storag...
Nexus 1000v 1.5 Upgrade
I just upgraded our lab Nexus 1000v from 1.4 to 1.5. Before the upgrade I assumed that it be like the upgrade from 1.3 to 1.4 where you first had to upgrade the VEM modules on each ESX host and then upgrade the VSM. Fortunately I didn’t just jump right in and go on those [...]
Posted in Uncategorized Comments closed
Cisco UCS 6248 Unified Port Configuration
One of the exciting new updates from Cisco recently is the 2nd generation UCS hardware. UCS gen 2 hardware included updated: Fabric Interconnect – 6248s Fabric Extender – 2208 Mezzanine Adapter – VIC 1280 For details on the new hardware check out Sean McGee’s post – http://www.mseanmcgee.com/2011/07/ucs-2-0-cisco-stacks-the-deck-in-las-vegas/ This post will focus on configuration of Unified [...]
Cisco Nexus 5000/7000 FEX Topologies
There seems to be some confusion on what the supported Nexus 7000/5000 FEX topologies are. The first section deals with the supported Nexus 5000/5500 FEX topologies. The next section will show the Nexus 7000 FEX topologies. The following topologies are valid for these NX-OS versions. Nexus 5000/5500: version 5.x and up Nexus 7000: version 5.1 [...]
Posted in Cisco Nexus, Nexus Comments closed
Cisco MDS Smart Zoning