#n9k

Right now a lot of Nexus 9K’s are sold by Cisco. Customers are using the NX-OS mode first and then they want to upgrade in the future. But there is a catch ! A Nexus 9K which is a spine, like the 9336PQ, can only run in ACI mode and NOT in NX-OS mode. Every N9K NX-OS switch are leaf and when converting the network to ACI, you will have to add SPINE switches.

When you have a 9508 chassis in NX-OS mode, then the blades CAN’t be spines in the future ! You will have to buy spine blades when converting to ACI.

This is something a lot of customers think it’s possible, but it’s not.

The nexus portfolio is very compleet and there are some overlaps regarding the devices and features.

A lot of people is asking when do the positioning a certain Nexus switch.

  Here’s is a quick overview of the portfolio with some unique features :

  Nexus 7000/7700

OTV, LISP, VXLAN, FCoE, High Density 1/10/40/100 Gb ports, DFA

Nexus 5000

Unified Ports, FC, FCoE, 10/40 Gb, DFA.

Nexus 3000

Low latency switches L2/L3, 1/10/40 Gb

Nexus 9000

Lead with N9K when you don’t need FC, DCI, Low Latency.

Way to go for ACI.

N9K

Do you have a network lab to try out new technologies? Then you might have experienced this problem: you finished testing technology A, and you start testing technology B. For that you need to reconfigure your devices, obviously. Now you need to try out something new in technology A, for example a new functionality brought in a recent software release.

You would have to save your existing configs (related to tech B), replay your tech A configs, test whatever you want to test, and then replay back your tech B configs. At least for me, that process sounded scary enough so that I did not want to change my running lab unless I had a very good reason to do so.

That has changed recently, with an app that my esteemed colleague Christian Jäckel has developed in order to quickly snapshot and deploy configurations across whole networks. You can find his work here (as well as a link to my fork): https://github.com/chjaecke/nexus_lab_deploy

You can see a demo video below, but essentially it can download the config of a group of network devices, and document it in a JSON file, which will represent a snapshot of your lab. You can deploy that snapshot with the tool as well, which will restore those specific configs in each one of the devices.

Here you have a short video that gives a glimpse on how this thing works:

Now I feel confident deleting all my VXLAN EVPN config from my lab, and start testing the exciting Segment Routing functionality that is now available in the Nexus 9000 product line.