Monthly Archives: May 2011

Cisco DCNI-2 Nexus Training

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This week I have been kept busy attending a Webex-based online delivery of Cisco’s Data Center Network Infrastructure 2 (DCNI-2) course. This course is basically all about the Nexus 7000 and 5000 platforms, the operating system (NXOS) and all the fun you can have with it. It has also turned up a few interesting side discussions, some of which I’ll share in this post.

I thought it might be worthwhile though to talk a little bit about the delivery of the online course, the materials, the scope of the course, and whether or not it’s any good. I’ve not taken a five day Cisco course online before, so this is an interesting experiment for me.

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Layer 2 Routing (sort of) and TRILL

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The post title alone is cause for fighting in some circles (it’s just an invitation for argument and I know it’s more of a marketing thing than a technically accurate description), but work with me here. On one level or another, there is growing interest and marketing around the concept of being able to eliminate Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) in layer 2 networks and enabling multipathing in bridged networks. It’s hard to have missed Cisco’s plugging of their FabricPath technology, and underneath all the marketing, routing frames from A to B is pretty much what it is about.

For the purposes of this post, we’ll look at why STP is such a beast to begin with (and let’s face it, that could be a multi-part post on its own), then I’ll look in a series of posts at three competing options that would allow you to get rid of it:

  • TRILL (in this post)
  • Shortest Path Bridging / 802.1aq
  • Juniper’s QFabric

Let’s dive straight in then.

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Surviving Cisco Live 2011

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Let’s talk about Cisco Live! I figure that three posts in a row on Visio is enough for anybody (myself included), so I’m going to take a detour and look back my most recent Cisco Live! experience (2010 in Las Vegas), talk a little about the logistics of being there, share a few tips that I would have appreciated the first time I went to Cisco Live!, and dig out a few pictures of some of the events that I haven’t published before. If you haven’t been to Cisco Live! before, I hope that some of the more mundane things I share are of use to you when you prepare to come – and if you’re a Cisco geek and you possibly can, you absolutely SHOULD come!

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Visio Shapesheets – My Misunderstood Friend (Part 3)

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There’s no escape from the continuing look at Microsoft Visio ShapeSheets! This post is Part 3 of 3 (although I strongly suspect that in Douglas Adams style I will shortly have to create “Part 4 of 3″ to look at some more advanced topics). As a reminder:

In Part 1 I covered some of the underlying terms and concepts required to play with textboxes. I suggest reading this before the other parts, since this is a continuation!

In Part 2 I looked at whether the changes discussed can be implemented without touching a shapesheet in the first place, and look at some of the issues that can arise by doing so.

In Part 3 (this post) I’m looking specifically at how to implement these changes consistently via the ShapeSheet.

First, we have to make the ShapeSheets visible!

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