#nx-os

Today Cisco release the new NX-OS 7.2.0(D1) for the Nexus 7K with some nice features. Before I show the Top 10 of feature, you can download the image via : bit.ly/1RfHxY5

10 : Support for the Nexus 7702

The Nexus 7702 is the new (small) chassis of the Nexus 7K range. See my post bit.ly/1IIDNi6 for more details.

9 : NX-OS Patching

Why reboot a sup when only a small piece of code was changed ? With patching only a small piece of code will be changed without any reboot. You can do this on the fly. Faster, Zero Impact Caveat Corrections

8 :ITD : Intelligent Traffic Director

You need some L4-L7 load balancing, just use ITD. In this release of NX-OS it got more scale. This feature is now in almost every Nexus that Cisco is providing. Really nice for webservers etc.

7 : MACSEC over FabricPath

Improved Security when using FabricPath

6 : FEX dual-homing (active/active)

When you have a host connected to two Fex, it’s a discussion if you need dual-homing. When a host is only connect with one ethernet connection and you want to minimize the Single Point of Failure, a lot of customers are thinking that the FEX should be dual homed…. When a host is single connected that is the SPOF…. But hey.. The feature is now also available for the N7K.

5 : 2300 FEX support on N7K

The new 2300 FEX is capable of Unified Ports, 40Gb etc. It’s the successor of the Nexus 2200 devices.

4 : LISP on F3 10/40/100G modules

LISP is something a lot of customers are looking at and right now the F3 cards are supporing LISP. It’s now the Highest Performance LISP Switch on the market

3 : NXAPI with JSON/XML Format

Automate, Automate, Automate. That’s the future. But how to automate ? Just use scripting and with the NX-API you can talk to the Nexus. Programmatic access to Nexus switches over HTTP/S (returns output in easy to read JSON format)

2 :FCoE on F3 10G/40G

Why use 32Gb FC when the 40G FCoE is way faster ! Due to the fact that the clock rate of the 40Gb FCoE is way different then FC, you really really get 40 Gb FCoE !!!

1 : L3 over vPC

Before this feature we had to design some workarounds about the designs some customers wanted to have. L3 over vPC is now possible. Hooray !!!

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.

Nexus 5000

sh hardware internal gatos all-ports

Nexus 5500

show hardware internal carmel all-ports

Nexus 5600

show hardware internal bigsur all-ports

Nexus 9000

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CiscoLive! Melbourne - 2016

Having to miss last years edition I was fortunate enough to be able to attend this years CiscoLive! conference in my hometown Melbourne again. Venue was excellent as usual. MCEC provides perfect facilities and is in the heart of the city so no dramas here. The opening keynote already showed to...

Mike Cohen | February 18, 2016 at 4:00 am PST

Today, SDN is being embraced by many companies to increase operational speed and efficiency of network management, and Cisco ACI is rapidly becoming the SDN solution of choice. A key part of Cisco’s SDN work is collaborations and integration with a diverse group of industry leaders and innovators. Cisco is especially focused on support for DevOps tools, as we see the growing customer movement towards the DevOps model.

Cisco has been working for some time with Ansible, a key innovator of DevOps tools, moving forward from proof of concept to demos, and integration. Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, network configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT tasks. Last fall, Red Hat – another key Cisco partner – acquired Ansible. Designed for multi-tier deployments since day one, Ansible models IT infrastructure by describing how all of your systems inter-relate, rather than just managing one system at a time. It uses no agents and no additional custom security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy. And most importantly, it uses a very simple language (YAML, in the form of Ansible Playbooks) that allow you to describe your automation jobs in a way that approaches plain English.

Today Red Hat is announcing that the Ansible 2.0 release supports Cisco Open NX-OS and the Nexus data center switching platforms. The integration between Ansible and Cisco Open NX-OS enables customers to model their infrastructure as code enabling DevOps-drivenSDN for Cisco Nexus Series switch platforms. Visitors to AnsibleFest today in London can see a demonstration of the integration between Ansible 2.0 and the Cisco switching platform. Visitors are also invited to attend the session: “Managing Your Cisco Data Center Network With Ansible” presented by Fabrizio Maccioni, Cisco Technical Marketing Engineer.

Automate Network Tasks

Tight integration between Cisco Open NX-OS and Ansible 2.0, will enable Cisco customers to quickly and simply automate the entire lifecycle of their application deployment, from initial provisioning, configuration, orchestration through decommissioning on a Cisco Nexus Programmable Network or VXLAN Programmable Fabric. It enables automation of common day zero operational tasks such as the configuration of SNMP, authentication, and logging, day two ongoing provisioning tasks such as configuration of port channels, VLANS, routing protocols (BGP/OSPF), overlays (VXLAN EVPN) and security (ACL’s), etc. Functionally, IT organizations will be able to utilize an intent driven resource model to describe the desired state of network devices and services, not the paths to get them to this state – Ansible and Open NX-OS will enable transforming it to the desired state. This allows reliable and repeatable IT infrastructure configuration, avoiding the potential failures from manual scripting solutions that focus on explicit actions and not the desired state of your infrastructure.