Biggest hit this month in my opinion was the release of the NXOS version 7.0(3)I1(2) for the Nexus 9000. I had the chance to test this in a real customer environment last week for VXLAN EVPN, and it worked great, specially in the network convergence area.
Don’t miss other exciting stuff like Santiago’s videos on stretched fabrics, and much much more!
- 7.0(3)I1(2) in cisco.com!
- 100G support, VXLAN on N9500, ITD and a lot more
- FEX on N9500 finally!
- And much more! Check the release notes for detailed info: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/nexus9000/sw/6-x/release/notes/70312_nxos_rn.html
- On ITD: maybe it was lost amongst last week news, but it won Best of Interop in its category too. Here some infos about it:
- Interview after the win: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bve10PQN6Iw
- Configuration guide: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/nexus9000/sw/7-x/itd/configuration/guide/b_Cisco_Nexus_9000_Series_NX-OS_Intelligent_Traffic_Director_Configuration_Guide_7x.html
- A lot of use cases, like basic server load balancing, or in some cases a replacement for WCCP
- Great Q3 FY15 earnings with good switching performance: http://www.businessinsider.com/cisco-reports-third-quarter-earnings-2015-5
- Simplifying ACI operations with Solutions Support: https://communities.cisco.com/community/technology/datacenter/sdn/aci-integrations/blog/2015/05/04/simplifying-aci-operations-with-solutions-support
- Two reviewed demos in dCloud (and please remember that dCloud demos can be now shared with customers):
- Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure 1.0 with F5 Integration v2
- Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure 1.0 with OpenStack Integration v2
- Check out Troy’s impressive collection of ACI API calls and easily import them from Postman (REST client for Chrome):
- APIC-logins: https://www.getpostman.com/collections/4be28734ae379faacce7
- CREATE-objects: https://www.getpostman.com/collections/c3659e912e0714e2934f
- DELETE-objects: https://www.getpostman.com/collections/76e7cc6505065009dda5
- DEMOS: https://www.getpostman.com/collections/2dd5f31847ca64076953
- QUERY-objects: https://www.getpostman.com/collections/d7970d8a3a453db8dbde
- When picking a MAC address for your anycast gateway functionality in VXLAN EVPN, you may want to set the 2 least significant bits of the first byte to a value that results in binary “10” (like x2xx:xxxx:xx-xx, x6xx:xxxx:xxxx or xA-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx). The binary “10” designates 1-for locally administered, 0-for unicast.
- In VXLAN EVPN, BFD for eBGP/iBGP is supported as long as the sessions are established using the directly connected addresses. If you use the loopbacks as source IP addresses for the iBGP/eBGP session, BFD is not supported
- Validation of long-distance stretched fabrics: Over the last months the team has been working to validate an ACI Stretched Fabric design with DCs located up to 800 KMs / 500 miles apart (i.e. 10ms RTT) and using 10G EoMPLS pseudowires between them. These two videos demonstrate the solution:
- vMotion over long distance stretched ACI Fabric: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLkryVvzFM0
- Long distance stretched ACI fabric, convergence times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgxPQNR_42c
- How Cisco IT secures its DCs: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/enterprise/cisco-on-cisco/m-dc-05072015-secure-datacenter.html
- New CVD for Cloudera Hadoop with and ACI: http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/UCS_CVDs/Cisco_UCS_Integrated_Infrastructure_for_Big_Data_with_ACI_and_Cloudera.pdf
- Some additional stuff from the web:
- Where to learn ACI: http://blogs.cisco.com/perspectives/where-to-learn-aci
- Lauren on AEPs: http://www.virtualizationadmin.com/articles-tutorials/general-virtualization-articles/cisco-aci-attachable-access-entity-profiles.html
- ACI security site: http://www.cisco.com/go/acisecurity
- Blog on network automation by Jason Edelman: http://jedelman.com/home/programming-an-aci-fabric/
- Blog by Joe Onisick explaining why ACI is an open network platform: http://www.definethecloud.net/application-centric-infrastructure-the-platform/
- How Cisco ACI Stands out from other Network Virtualization Solutions – Part 1: http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/aci-comparison-1
- How Cisco ACI Stands out from other Network Virtualization Solutions – Part 2: http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/aci-comparison-2
- Article by Mike Cohen and Harry Petty for ONF about VXLAN: https://opennetworkingusergroup.com/vxlan-comes-of-age-with-bgp-evpn/
- Check out the white paper on the already discussed stretched ACI fabric, by WWT: https://www2.wwt.com/stretched-active-active-aci-fabric/white-paper-stretched-active-active-aci-fabric/
- Application Dependency Mapping Service: http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/discovering-application-server-network-dependencies-to-facilitate-aci-and-application-migration
- Videos
- Why ACI? (1:35): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT2B3h36IWM
- ACI stretched fabric over 800km, link failures and convergence times (Santiago and Patrice, 18:39): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgxPQNR_42c
- vMotion over stretched ACI fabric 800km apart (Santiago and Patrice, 12:24): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLkryVvzFM0
- Lauren on the policy-driven data center (13:22): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUiyWOg6sv8
- ACI enables proactive SLA assurance (Joe Onisick, 2:33): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Krq-YnC8sVE
- ACI designed for high application performance (Joe Onisick: 2:06): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1qK4qdhX2w
- ACI REST APIs for creating a 2-tier app (Troy, 4:28): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKtKd7relnM
- ACI enables the DevOps model (Joe Onisick, 2:39): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFK5dfMCxw0
- ACI simplifies diagnosis of slow email access (Joe Onisick, 2:04): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDXUDCFhwvA
- Next-Gen Security and Cisco ACI (Scott Harell, 4:24): https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/featured/next-generation-security-cisco-video/2015/04/
- Super session in Cisco Live Melbourne: Soni talks with Matt Chamley, Head of Infrastructure from Woolworths (1:19): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFHMpgXTI24
- Internetnetwork Engineering implements ACI (2:38): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cvmHS6Etlo
- AVI Networks integration in ACI (3:10): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqT2Me2V4uA. Check out how easy service graphs can be
- Cisco ACI for the Microsoft Cloud Platform (Microsoft Ignite, 1:11:35): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6rwgY2F8QA
Cloudtrooper 