Distributed Data Centers

My thoughts on what cloud computing and the future of the data center has changed a bit in the last 3 years.  When I first started working on a cloud computing project for a large bank in America back in 2008 I was convinced that soon every enterprise would create their own private cloud and…

1000v in and out of vCenter

I was setting up the Nexus 1110 (aka: virtual service appliance, aka: VSA) with one of our best customers and as we were doing it the appliance rebooted never to come up again without completely reinstalling the firmware from the remote media.  Most of this was probably my fault because I didn’t follow the docs…

Quick SPAN with the Nexus 1000v

Today I thought I’d take a look at creating a SPAN session on the 1000v to monitor traffic.  I found it really easy to do!  SPAN is one of those things that takes you longer to read and understand than to actually configure.  I find that true with a lot of Cisco products:  Fabric Path,…

Nexus 1000v – A kinder gentler approach

One of the issues skeptical Server Administrators have with the 1000v is that they don’t like the management interface being subject to a virtual machine.  Even though the 1000v can be configured so that if the VSM gets disconnected/powered-off/blownup the system ports can still be forwarded.  But that is voodoo.  Most say:  Give me a…

A Nexus 1000v Value Proposition

There’s a lot of collateral about why the Nexus 1000v would be a good thing to have in your virtual environment.  When I talk to people about it one of my first questions is: “Who manages the virtual networking environment in the data center?” Most of the time its the virtual machine administrators.  Its usually…