Cisco Nexus

Ray Soucy rps at maine.edu
Tue Feb 3 12:18:49 UTC 2015


I have a small setup, Nexus 2 x 5596UP + 12 x 2248TP FEX, 2 x B22DELL,
2 x B22HP, 1 x C2248PQ-10GE.

Been using this setup since 2012, so it's getting a bit long in the
tooth.  It's in an Active-Active setup because there wasn't much
guidance at the time on which way to go.  There are some restrictions
with an AA setup you probably want to avoid.  We currently don't do
any FCoE because we're mostly a NetApp and NFS environment.

The performance and stability have been great.

It works well for a traditional environment with a lot of wired ports
to stand-alone servers.  If you do a lot with virtualization it's not
a great solution.  You really want to avoid connecting VM host servers
to FEX ports because of all the restrictions that come with it.  One
restriction that's a real PITA for me right now is that a FEX port
can't be a promiscuous trunk port if you're using PVLAN.

Using config-sync has been a lot of trouble.  There are a lot of
actions that will verify OK but then fail.  The result is that things
are partially configured and the whole system gets out of sync not
letting you make any other changes; the fix is having to manually go
in to each switch to try and get the configuration to match (which
requires comparing the running-configuration to the running
switch-profile configuration).


On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 1:17 PM, Herman, Anthony
<Anthony.Herman at mattersight.com> wrote:
> Nanog,
>
> I would like to poll the collective for experiences both positive and negative with the Nexus line. More specifically I am interested in hearing about FEX with N2K at the ToR and if this has indeed made any impact on Opex as well as non-obvious shortcomings to using the fabric extenders. Also if anyone is using any of the Nexus line for I/O convergence (FCoE) I would be interested in hearing your experience with this as well.
>
> Thank you in advance,
>
> -A



-- 
Ray Patrick Soucy
Network Engineer
University of Maine System

T: 207-561-3526
F: 207-561-3531

MaineREN, Maine's Research and Education Network
www.maineren.net



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